Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi.
Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.
—Sina Queyras, Expressway
Perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator: and in many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb.
—Lewis Mumford
In J. G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, a wealthy young architect named Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar in central London. The car smashes through a roadside barrier, plunges down a grassy embankment, and lands in a “small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes.”1 The island, which is “sealed off from the world around it by the high embankments on two sides and the wire-mesh fence on its third,”2 reproduces a familiar milieu in Ballardian literature: the overdeveloped and psychologically precarious modern environment of industrial capitalism. While Concrete Island is, in the most general sense, simply a recreation of Robinson Crusoe in the context of a modern metropolis, with Maitland dramatically “exited from reality” in a quick succession of “a defective tyre-wall” and “a bang on the head,”3 it exemplifies what I am calling infrastructural brutalism because, unlike Ballard’s more famous novels of this era, Crash (1973) and High-Rise (1975), Concrete Island isolates its action to “a forgotten traffic island,”4 and so it takes place within the spaces of concrete infrastructure instead of the habitations that infrastructure usually connects. Here, infrastructure isolates, toxifies, dispossesses, and immobilizes, contrary to the more common infrastructural tropes of connectivity and mobility. As a subject of infrastructural brutalism, Maitland breathes the “warm, exhaust-filled air . . . his entire nervous system [is] scraped by invisible knives,”5 reminiscent of contemporary Shanghai residents caught in the too-common event of an “airpocalypse.” There is no respite from the “maze of concrete causeways,”6 and he hates the passing motorists. The world of concrete infrastructure is a “nightmare” of the “slumbering” European continent.7 Decades before scholars articulated the concept of “automobility” as an assemblage of cars, roads, laws, and other systems and objects that make motoring possible, Ballard asked: “Was the entire island an extension of the Jaguar, its windshield and windows transformed by his delirium into these embankments?”
Injured from the crash, Maitland fashions a crutch from an exhaust pipe, then recovers water from the windshield washers. Maitland must survive in a space that resembles so many contemporary urban wastelands:
No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder’s forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence.8
While Ballard’s emphasis falls on the unpreparedness of the typical urbanite to deal with a technological breakdown—something the literature of infrastructure studies routinely foregrounds when it discusses the “invisibility” of infrastructure—his novel also creatively imagines the transversal ecological, political, and psychological brutality of an environment constructed with copious amounts of concrete and shaped by capitalist propensities. Studies of infrastructure often isolate these components—the ecological devastation of global urbanization, the racist and classist structures of large infrastructure projects, and the manic-depressive qualities of capitalist realism. But here in the form of a novel, the transversal lines of infrastructural brutalism assemble, multiply, cut across, and generally defy disciplinary thought and praxis. What Ballard calls “that whole system of comfortable expectations [Maitland] had carried with him”9 to the concrete island, an array of assumptions based on the uninterrupted functioning of industrial infrastructure in a metropolitan center in the Global North, is exposed for its sociopolitical precarity when the subject of infrastructural brutalism is forced to confront the material existence of infrastructure. Suddenly “the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size.”10 Maitland’s accident, like the art of infrastructural brutalism, makes visible the intersecting and interdisciplinary lines of an exposed-concrete aesthetic and its necropolitical valences,11 and refuses to reconcile these relations in a complacent narrative of progress or anticivilizational utopianism. Unlike the conventional depictions of infrastructure that foreground reductive visions of improved mobility and social connectivity, the walls and highways of Concrete Island position an infrastructural subject who is trapped, isolated, poisoned, and starved by his overdeveloped surroundings. Infrastructure here is not a panacea that unites but a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. “Streets,” wrote English poet and dramatist Heathcote Williams, “once the open forum of daily life, / Are now the open sewers of the car cult.”12 For a nonfiction example, consider that auto accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans under 40; almost 1 percent of Americans will die in a car crash.13 Edward Humes puts the death toll of car crashes in the United States into context: “One year of car crash injuries and deaths in the U.S. is greater than all the [U.S. military] dead and wounded from the entire duration of all those wars [World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution] combined, with numbers to spare to cover all Union Army dead and wounded from the Civil War as well.”14 Worldwide, 1.25 million people die in car accidents annually, with as many as 50 million injuries related to automobility in the same period.15 That number does not include the premature deaths caused by air pollution, climate change, ecological degradation caused by paved roads, and other impacts of automobility. That number also does not include nonhuman animal deaths directly caused by roads: in the United States alone, over 1 million nonhuman animals die on roads every day; over the past 30 years, vertebrates in the US were more likely to die on roads than because of hunting.16 Around the world, roads usher a variety of habitat fragmentation and destruction: “In equatorial Africa’s Congo Basin, logging roads have attracted a new wave of elephant poachers; in Siberia, road expansion has caused an outbreak of wildfires; in Suriname, roads invite illegal gold mining; and in Finland, so many reindeer are killed by cars that herders have considered marking the animals with reflective paint.”17 Within twenty years, most fragmented habitats lose half of their animal and plant species, and over 70 percent of the world’s forests are now within a kilometer of a habitat edge. Many overdeveloped nations are already concrete islands, and the infrastructure agenda proposed by capitalism for the coming decades will eliminate the few escape routes remaining.
Maitland’s decision “to dominate the island and harness its limited resources,” something he comes to see as “a more important goal than escaping,”18 marks the dystopian moment in Concrete Island, the “will to survive” that might be equated with Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”19 because his survivalist impulse embraces industrial refuse and its dead spaces as something to dominate, something to live with and for, much like the global urbanization project and its promises of “green” and “resilient” cities, even as the global ecological collapse advances and surpasses planetary boundaries essential to human existence. This is also what I am calling infrastructural brutalism: the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more oil pipelines, more large dams, more roads, more paved surfaces than at any time in human history. Many subjects of this brutal world have internalized its suicidal features, much as Maitland eventually equates the concrete island with himself: “Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body.”20 Infrastructural brutalism manifests in an aggregation of industrial trajectories producing cancerous bodies, polluted lungs, atrophied muscles, and depressed and anxious brains.21 Often the assemblage of brutal maladies is so dense and prolonged that remedies begin by segregating infrastructure from the list of inimical objects and relations. This oversight is produced by capitalist priorities: instead of not building another oil pipeline, the emphasis of state capitalism is on building better pipelines; instead of expertly decommissioning all nuclear reactors, the emphasis of state capitalism is on maintaining an unsustainable level of energy consumption that makes nuclear reactors appear necessary (and their waste appear like a reasonable risk); instead of recognizing that planetary ecological limits have been breached, state capitalism advocates more industrial infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. This book is designed to articulate some of the necropolitical contours and history of infrastructural brutalism through the examination of artistic forms that engage infrastructure as their central focus—literature about hydroelectric projects that produce drowned towns, films about traveling on paved roads, photography of the energy landscapes past and present, and narratives of death trains from the colonial period to the present eco-apocalypse. The approach to infrastructure studies in this book draws inspiration from Stephanie Wakefield and Glenn Dyer, who argue that the study of infrastructure ought to “reorient the way we think about power, life, and revolution, and to set out adequate starting points from which to begin rebuilding all three.”22 If we do not reconsider how infrastructure conjoins “power, life, and revolution,” the capitalist expansion of infrastructure planned for the next 20 years will ensure a prolonged catastrophe of accelerated climate change and multiple converging ecological crises in which it will make sense to consider the possibility of the near-term extinction of the species.
Many of the examples of the aesthetics of infrastructural brutalism in this book derive from the literature, film, and photography of the United States. This is at least in part because I agree with Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s assessment of the United States as “the homeland of necro-aesthetics.”23 Author Henry Miller once remarked that he had “walked the streets” of many countries around the world but nowhere did he feel “so degraded and humiliated” as he did in the US: “I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit.”24 The US combines the global reach of many of its artistic endeavours with a domestic history of slavery and genocide, as well as the use of the atomic bomb and the unparalleled distribution of contemporary necropower through the Pentagon.25 While the necropolitial legacy of the US will soon be surpassed by China, there is no better consistent exemplar of necro-aesthetics than US history; to the list of atrocities above, I wish to add the necrostructural achievements of modern industrial infrastructure in the US, especially its pioneering developments of hydroelectric power and paved roads. As the world plunges into what Bifo calls “the posthistorical dimension of pure horror,”26 it remains an essential task to trace the historical and contemporary necropolitical contours of this horror, a horror I am calling infrastructural brutalism, to confront as best we can, in what little time remains, the structural integrity and persistence of the horror. Because so much of the scholarship on infrastructure emerges from the Global North, it is a scholarship that rarely accounts for the necropolitical features of infrastructure. How industrial infrastructure condemns millions of humans and nonhuman animals to death, in its construction and operation, is the “power and . . . capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,” as Mbembe describes necropolitics.27 Since the majority of those “who may live” by this infrastructure now depend on it for survival, few of them will frame infrastructure as a death-dealing assemblage. But now that the planet has clearly crossed over into various forms of ecological collapse, industrial infrastructure is obviously the central feature of the unevenly distributed horror in which life now exists, and, of course, long before global ecological collapse was a reality, the victims of infrastructural necropolitics were well aware of its implications.
Infrastructural brutalism emerges concomitant with what Bernard Stiegler calls “hyper-industrialism,” the condition in which “more than ever we are experiencing the industrialization of all things.”28 This hyperindustrialist era manifests in many ways; for example, while Silicon Valley has deployed nautical metaphors to describe the economic and intellectual mobility of the Internet, a more conventional industrial form of trade, overseas shipping, has proliferated. Seaborne trade has increased fourfold from 1970 to the present, and two-thirds of US oil supplies arrive by ship.29 Hyperindustrialism continues to inform global capitalism, despite performative talk of “greening” capitalism, or building “resilient” cities, or the supposed transformation into a “postindustrial” world. The escalation of environmental, social, and psychological brutality under hyperindustrial expansion emanates from many forms of structural oppression (colonialism, white supremacy, homophobia, speciesism, etc.), and the current study of infrastructural brutalism does not assume primacy among those forms; however, infrastructural brutalism provides the semio-material support for most systems of oppression under industrial capitalism. The “critical” infrastructure that sustains life in industrialized societies also generates necropolitical assemblages, death-dealing dispossession, and structural oppressions. The mythology of the postindustrial society has furnished ideological cover for the ecological devastation of the neoliberal era of capitalism, the post-1950 destruction that scientists have described as the Great Acceleration, “the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.”30 Saskia Sassen eloquently describes the neoliberal mesh of extractive industries and high finance that produced the current global order of destruction as “a world where complexity too often tends to produce elementary brutalities.”31 Bifo frames the neoliberal era in terms of the 60 percent increase in suicide rates that accompanied the postwar period of neoliberalism:
In the past forty-five years, two new phenomena have penetrated human bio-sociality: the neoliberal acceleration of the economic pace and the digital mutation of cognitive and emotional stimulation. It is these two trends that are at the root of the growing suicide epidemic. An epidemic of misery is spreading on the planet while the absolutism of financial capitalism asserts its right to total control over our lives. As bio-semiocapitalism infiltrates the conscious organisms’ nervous cells, it simultaneously inoculates these very organisms with a necropolitical rationale—a morbid sentiment that is progressively infesting the collective unconscious, culture and sensibility at large. The biopolitical effect of semiocapitalism—or, better said, the thanato-political effect of semiocapitalism—consists of capturing cognitive activity and of subjecting the linguistic animal’s faculty of expression to the sleepless, aggressive dynamics of the labour market. Exploitation, competition, mobbing, precariousness and layoffs are no longer perceived as a result of conflictual social relations. On the contrary, they are internalised as deficiencies of the self, as personal inadequacies. The unceasing restructuring and reorganisation of work is experienced as a brutality and humiliation, too.32
It is from within this ecological collapse and semiocapitalist misery, this attenuated expansion of industrial blight, that most humans relate to industrial infrastructure, its aesthetics and politics. Charles Thorpe describes the necroculture of capitalism as “a decaying system stubbornly resisting its slow death”: “Its life support is imperialist war, ecological destruction, police-state surveillance and brutality, the degradation of culture by corporate mass media, and a mass psychology of hopelessness.”33 It is from within this context, then, that potential forms of liberation must be theorized and practiced.
The state form provides material and logistical support for hyperindustrial expansion, and in this capacity over the past century the state has become suicidal. From the military bunkers of World War II to the large dams, highways, and assorted industrial infrastructure that define the contemporary urban milieu and its supporting assemblages, the suicidal state exhibits a brutal architecture of flows and accretion whose collective consequence is the construction of a global necropolis. In 2006, J. G. Ballard wrote in the Guardian about his experience of Utah Beach and the concrete fortifications of the Atlantic Wall. The author who had immortalized brutalist architecture three decades earlier in the vicious class warfare of High-Rise was reminded of the “run-down tower blocks and motorway exit ramps” in England as he surveyed the blockhouses and stained concrete walls of Utah Beach.34 To Ballard, the concrete fortifications that face the English Channel are “a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s.”35 Ballard’s association of wartime infrastructure and the postwar architectural form that has experienced a resurgent popularity over the past decade echoes the famous analysis of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology (original French edition 1975) in which Virilio refers to the abandoned German bunkers on the coast of France as an “archeology of the brutal encounter,” an architectural form indicative of the mass murder it anticipates. “From the point of impact at collision to the highway pile-up,” Virilio wrote, “the infrastructure set up the duel”;36 indeed, 30 years before Ballard’s reflections on Utah Beach, Virilio used synonymous language in describing the bunkers as “funerary monuments of the German dream.”37 Contemporary industrial societies are so enamored with infrastructure as sources of mobility, technological advance, and economic prosperity that their necropolitical valences rarely enter the discussion, and Virilio’s and Ballard’s association of infrastructure and death occur only within the context of tactical military infrastructure and an architectural form long condemned and abandoned by bourgeois tastemakers. While Virilio’s concern rested on speed and its infrastructures, his idiom—“the brutal encounter”—would be considered by neoliberal observers as specific to the predigital era, before the annihilating implosion of speed came to be associated with nanoseconds and network topologies. Virilio was one of the earliest critical theorists to understand the transformative power of industrial infrastructure, though his contribution remains largely unacknowledged in infrastructure studies. In Bunker Archeology, he establishes the infrastructural quality of his dromological perspective: “the arrival of a new infrastructural-vehicular system always revolutionizes a society in overthrowing both its sense of material and its sense of social relationships—thus the sense of the entire social space. The superior speed of various means of communication and destruction is, in the hands of the military, the privileged means for a secret and permanent social transformation, a projectile for the destruction of the social continuum, a weapon, an implosive.”38 Curiously, he would not foreground the “implosive” dynamic of the highway system in his discussion of the suicidal state, which would focus instead on political parties such as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge turning the state form suicidal.
Virilio’s discussion of the suicidal state emerges in his 1976 book The Insecurity of Territory. In the context of what he calls total peace, or a “sinister period”39 of deterrence that enables a permanent threat of war, Virilio argues that the “the life of states, their destiny, will be subordinated to general strategy. . . . Thus, as with total war, it will be possible to wage total peace from above and afar.”40 Significantly, “the technological programs advanced by peace and war tend to overlap,” as nuclear deterrence and capitalist globalization become “frames of integration, structures already chosen to which all the rest must come to be subordinated.”41 The Germans, argues Virilio, were the first to live total war, and thus became a model for the Allies to study. The outcome of total war and total peace is the suicidal state, a condition in which, as Virilio writes, “the war of milieu is succeeded by war waged on the milieu—nature, society.”42 This suicidal ethos is captured historically by Hitler’s Telegram 71, written at the end of the war, in which he declared, “If the war is lost, may the nation perish.”43 The concept of the suicidal state was condensed by Deleuze and Guattari into the following statement: “In fascism the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal.”44 On March 19, 1945, Hitler issued the “Demolitions on Reich Territory Decree,” or the “Nero Decree,” in which he ordered the destruction of German infrastructure so the advancing Allied armies would have nothing to claim. His order was ignored, but arguably this historical antecedent of state suicidalism presages the contemporary capitalist desire to expand industrial infrastructure in the context of mass extinction; in other words, just as in the face of defeat Hitler embraced a nihilism that would doom millions to starvation and death if his order had been executed, the contemporary capitalist push for more accumulation and industrial expansion in the context of an existing ecological collapse is choosing self-annihilation over life. Recently, scholars such as Eugene Holland and Nicholas Michelsen have debated whether the definition of the suicidal state offered by Virilio and approved by Deleuze and Guattari is historically accurate or even true to the Deleuzoguattarian understanding of fascism. Holland believes the “problem with Virilio’s notion of the suicide state is that it depends on taking Hitler’s infamous Telegram 71 . . . and reading it backwards as the interpretive key to the fascist movement and regime as a whole.”45 For Holland, “there is nothing intrinsically ‘suicidal’ about historical fascism,”46 and on this point he is correct. On Holland’s fundamental critique of Virilio and other theorists of the suicidal state, Michelsen agrees: “The idea that Nazism was suicidal ‘from the very beginning’ certainly seems problematic,” he writes. This projection also “risks inflecting [Deleuze and Guattari’s] theory of fascism with an essentialist tone.”47 However, Michelsen argues that Holland’s critique ignores a key element in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of fascism, the third, suicidal line of flight, in addition to the molar and molecular lines of the political real.48 Therefore, “to reduce, as Holland does, the third fascist line in Deleuze and Guattari’s schema to a contingency of Nazism is to miss a crucial dimension of their political cartography of fascism as entailing both reterritorializations and deterritorializations.”49 So, while Holland argues that Virilio’s definition of the suicidal state incorrectly reads Hitler’s eventual suicidalism as an inherent feature of Nazism, Michelsen accuses Holland of not being Deleuzoguattarian enough. In his March 17, 1976 lecture, Michel Foucault also references Hitler’s Telegram 71, this time as the fulfillment of an argument about the Nazi state, racism, and biopower. “There was, in Nazism,” writes Foucault, “a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the right to kill and of exposure to death. We have an absolutely racist State, an absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State.”50 Foucault argues that the “mechanism inscribed in the workings of the modern State” always leads to suicide. He does not argue for the kind of historicism preferred by Holland; instead, he claims that suicidalism is “inscribed in the workings of all States.” A basic omission in these theories of the suicidal state is a concern for the specific technosocial apparatus that produces suicidalism even in the perceived absence of conventional fascism.51 The normal functioning of global capitalism within earth’s sixth mass extinction is suicidal, and infrastructure propels this necropolitical capacity.
In the contemporary context of ecological collapse, industrial infrastructure are undeniably essential elements in environmental disintegration. Virilio famously describes “the war machine as the archetype of the industrial machine,”52 and the German bunkers are “the place where the long organization of territorial infrastructures comes to an end, from the steps of the empire, to the borders of the state, to the continental threshold.”53 Decades after Bunker Archeology, Virilio characterized a “new bunker” in his discussion of the Israel-Gaza barrier:
The bunker as passage. You have the humanitarian corridor and the concrete corridor. . . . Bunkers used to be places of shelter, or places from where they could fire on allied ships along the Atlantic coast; now they’ve become corridors of concrete. The new bunker is a passage from one place to another. It makes you think of “gated communities” in the United States . . . not mentioning Latin America, the Alphavilles in Sao Paolo, etc. There are even some starting up in France.54
From architecture to infrastructure, the bunker takes on a transitive quality, with securitized state borders and capitalist “free trade zones,” corridor urbanism and the Calais Jungle, forming a global sarcophagus. New intercontinental fixed-link megastructures will extend “territorial infrastructures” beyond “the continental threshold,” as we enter an era of fixed-link planetary infrastructure including proposals for a global highway, a rail tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar to connect Africa and Europe, and various bridges or tunnels to connect Asia and North America over the Bering Sea. The purpose of these and many other intercontinental fixed-link infrastructure projects is to embed the escalation of primitive accumulation in increasingly global and permanent megastructures, a systemic intensification of hyperindustrialism that will ensure the path to human extinction is paved and resilient.
While scientists continue to debate the onset of the Anthropocene, some date its beginning to 1950 and the postwar Great Acceleration that included the radioactive fallout from testing nuclear bombs, as well as the transformation of the planet by the distribution of “plastic pollution, aluminium and concrete particles, and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilisers.”55 The terrestrial resources extracted for human use tripled between 1970 and 2010.56 The rapidity with which these signals of a new geological era have embedded, sometimes irreversibly, in the earth is unprecedented, and most of these signals can be traced directly to the expansion of industrial capitalism, which included an unprecedented urbanization project. In the past 20 years alone, for example, global construction has consumed more than half of the concrete ever produced.57 The more than 50 billion tonnes of concrete that have been produced are enough to pour a kilogram of concrete on every square meter of the planet.58 So much concrete is being produced today that there is actually a global shortage of sand, creating violent gang warfare in places such as India over the $2.3 billion annual trade, and escalating ecological crises emerging from legal and illegal sand mining.59 Ironically, the ubiquity of concrete might be one reason for the relative absence of its aesthetic consideration beyond notable architectural movements such as brutalism; a definitive exception to this absence is the work of Adrian Forty, who was determined in his 2012 book Concrete and Culture “to think about concrete in all the diversity of its applications, not just those controlled by architects and engineers, but to deal with its presence everywhere, whether in the work of self-builders, sculptors, writers, politicians, entrepreneurs, photographers or film-makers.”60 Forty, a professor of architectural history, did a masterful job of finding many of the cultural manifestations of concrete. In many ways, my book expands on his foundational work. Forty’s emphasis on architectural history tends to overlook the infrastructural narratives that I study, but his work articulates important ideas that make possible the study of infrastructure and culture. Forty describes the fundamental association of concrete and modernity, and our attendant “discomfort” with both.61 “At least in the West, as long as concrete remains bound to modernity, with all the tensions that carries in its train, concrete cannot easily revert to invisibility,” writes Forty.62 Concrete is often figured as “a dumb or stupid material, more associated with death than life,” and no doubt this cultural framing of concrete has contributed to the postindustrial fantasies of “frictionless,” “smart,” “green” capitalism.63 There is also a class-based distaste for concrete, which is used by the poor for construction to such an extent that Forty says it “probably exceeds all other applications.”64 Even within the building trades, concrete is considered the provenance of lower-status labor.65 Historically, concrete construction enables what Forty calls “a satisfactory separation of the mental from the manual elements of labour,” and this has led to its use in projects involving forced labor; most of the canals and highways built under Stalin, to offer one somewhat modern example, were constructed using labor from the gulags.66 Not surprisingly, then, concrete became a prominent fixture in utopian movements and socialist politics, beginning with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516).67 From the early twentieth century onward, concrete was often aligned with leftist politics: “the synthetic nature of reinforced concrete made it a symbol for Lenin’s view of the ‘indissoluble unity’ of the proletariat, formed through the process of revolution.”68 Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe became synonymous with the prefabricated concrete slabs of Plattenbau apartment buildings.69 Forty points to the standardized composition of these buildings and their rapid construction as a contemporary potential for dramatic social changes as they simultaneously decay:
The millions of dwellings built in the 40-year period between 1950 and 1990 with broadly similar systems will all deteriorate over a similar period, some of them sooner rather than later. For many East European and Asian states, these buildings are a burden beyond their means and, because of the nature of their construction, beyond the means of those who live in them. In 2000 one World Health Organization official foresaw that the condition of the buildings could threaten political stability in those regions. Far from being an agent of social unity, concrete may yet provoke a revolution.70
The current era sees therefore both massive postwar concrete buildings and infrastructures falling into disrepair and unprecedented proposals for new construction. A unique opportunity exists to abate the capitalist misuse and excessive deployment of concrete, to redirect the affective ties to concrete, and to prevent a fatalistic sensibility from becoming entrenched due to the depressing combination of ecological and urban conditions. The revolutionary potential of concrete is no longer attached singularly to proletarian productivity and utopian aspirations; on the contrary, much of the revolutionary potential of concrete now resides in its decay and destruction, in the assemblages of rapid industrial deceleration. The embrace of industrial modernization by both capitalist and communist nations in the twentieth century contributed to the current consumption of materials used in concrete production, which accounts for about 8 billion tonnes of raw materials annually; only water outpaces concrete as the most used material on the planet.71 Cement production accounts for 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions.72 Waste produced by construction and demolition constitutes approximately 25 to 50 percent of annual municipal solid waste in Europe.73 All major capitalist economies plan to escalate concrete production in the coming decades, and infrastructure represents a key component of this escalation. The first major infrastructure project to utilize concrete extensively was the Pont-sur-Yonne Aqueduct, completed in 1873 and designed by French industrialist and Saint-Simonian socialist François Coignet.74 Almost 150 years later, in the context of an unprecedented capitalist investment in infrastructure construction, there can no longer be a radical vision of the future that relies so excessively on concrete to produce wealth for redistribution. The depletion of resources and the catastrophic destruction of global ecosystems will not allow it.
As part of its postwar reconstruction effort, in 1945 France sent a team of experts to study the New Deal construction projects in the United States, especially the planned development of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with the goal of visiting infrastructure such as highways, dams, and airports, and documenting the lessons applicable to the war-ravaged landscape across the Atlantic.75 The team was particularly impressed with TVA dams. Michel Écochard, an architect and member of the French team, enthusiastically declared at the completion of the mission: “The beauty of the dams and their infrastructure . . . satisfied me both aesthetically and practically.”76 In 1946, following the team that crisscrossed the United States, the Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier visited the Norris Dam, constructed by the TVA on the Clinch River in Anderson County and Campbell County, Tennessee.77 Le Corbusier was impressed by the poured-concrete modernist appearance of the dam, which was designed by the Hungarian-American socialist Roland Wank, and Le Corbusier’s own work of the 1930s “had already begun to focus on the union of architecture and infrastructure, drawn in part from his admiration for the American elevated highway.”78 Le Corbusier was similarly impressed with the Pentagon, which he visited on his way back to New York from Tennessee. Its scale and use of concrete contained elements over which Le Corbusier marveled as “all that [I] could design in [my] projects so implacably rejected until now.”79 From 1947 to 1952, Le Corbusier would reproduce the aesthetic of the Norris Dam in one of his most famous projects, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. While the invention of the modernist architectural style that became known as béton brut, or raw concrete, has a more varied set of origins, this specific connection between architectural brutalism and the aesthetic of infrastructural megastructures provides a nexus from which to elaborate what I am calling infrastructural brutalism, an aesthetic and broad political program that emerges in the spaces of industrial infrastructure expansion and collapse, in particular as the global ecological collapse confronts the paradoxical and suicidal continuing expansion of industrial capitalism. Architectural brutalism emerges, in the British context in particular, as a by-product of petromodernity. Barnabas Calder calls the brutalist period in British architecture “an orgiastic celebration” of the emergent “massive energy wealth” provided by oil in the 1960s, an inexpensive energy source that provided an abundance of concrete and steel.80 This exemplary form of modernist architecture is often identified with postwar reconstruction and the rise of the welfare state. But infrastructural brutalism has received far less attention, despite its more pervasive presence. Consider the collective aesthetic and political materializations of over 19.5 million kilometers of paved roads worldwide,81 more than 4.3 million kilometers of pipelines carrying oil, gas, water, condensate, and refined products,82 and more than 1.3 million kilometers of railway networks.83 Consider the International Energy Agency’s prediction that for the projected increases in global capitalist trade, “the world will need to add nearly 25 million paved road lane-kilometres and 335,000 rail track kilometres, or a 60 percent increase over 2010 combined road and rail network length by 2050.”84 Over 95 percent of the human population now breathes heavily polluted air, with people in the Global South at far greater risk than others; over 6 million people died from air pollution in 2016.85 The existing and projected industrial infrastructure carpets the overdeveloped world, but to date there are few comprehensive attempts to articulate the intersection of what Brian Larkin calls “the politics and poetics of infrastructure”86 in terms of the necropolitics of infrastructure.
Infrastructural brutalism is an aesthetic, a political program, and a psychological and material condition. The central paradox of infrastructural brutalism is this: industrial capitalism incurred the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the planet;87 overfished the oceans and acidified them, similar to the phenomenon that killed off 90 percent of ocean life 252 million years ago;88 assaulted coral reefs to the extent that 40 percent are in decline worldwide;89 cut down almost half of the trees (and cuts down another 15 billion every year);90 killed half of the wild animals on earth in the past 40 years;91 cultivated every space on the planet to the point that there is no longer such a thing as “pristine” land untouched by humans;92 ignited catastrophic runaway global climate change that, unchecked, will produce an estimated warming of 6° Celsius above baseline by the end of this century;93 produced 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances annually, leading scientists to declare the earth a “toxic” planet saturated with 144,000 human-made chemicals;94 produced 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic since the 1950s, and could produce an estimated accumulation of 34 billion tonnes by 2050;95 and pushed the planet into a new geological epoch termed the Anthropocene, to denote the impact of human beings as the equivalent of a geological force.96 The scientific evidence that describes this condition is overwhelming; and yet, despite the obvious state of global ecological collapse that is clearly under way, substantial numbers of industrial capitalist societies are actually escalating the urbanization project, building engineering megastructures at an accelerated rate, instead of slowing or reversing the pace of industrialization. With human extinction on the horizon, capitalists have accelerated the construction of the infrastructure that enables ecological devastation at an unprecedented pace. According to a Princeton University study, to avoid catastrophic climate change and keep global warming below 2° C above baseline, the world would have to have stopped building new fossil fuel infrastructure by 2018;97 a climate study from the UK determined that the world must reach zero carbon emissions many years in advance of 2040, to avoid the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s target of global warming no more than 2° C above baseline.98 A major report from the IPCC in 2018 warned that the world had 12 years to act, to prevent global warming from increasing more than 1.5° above baseline. The difference between 1.5° and 2° of warming is substantial.99 Harvard professor of atmospheric chemistry James Anderson has argued that humanity must stop using fossil fuels before 2023 to avoid its own extinction.100 But in 2015, the world consumed more oil and gas than at any time in human history101 and recently surpassed an atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 410 ppm, a concentration on track to create a climate not seen in 50 million years.102 The global consumption of oil is now close to 100 million barrels per day. The consumption of coal has receded recently but still remains well above nineteenth-century rates of consumption; in fact, it is estimated that coal will remain the second-most consumed source of energy until 2030, with an average annual increase in consumption of 0.6 percent from 2012 to 2040.103 As Simon Pirani notes, global consumption of coal in the twentieth century “declined relatively [relative to other fossil fuels] while rising in absolute terms.”104 In 2017, new coal-fired power plants in India and China contributed to the first increase in coal production in 4 years.105 In recent years, G20 countries have tripled their subsidies for coal power.106 And climate change might not be our biggest threat. For example, a massive UN-supported study published in 2018 revealed that biodiversity loss could pose as great a threat to human survival as climate change. The study found that “exploitable fisheries in the world’s most populous region—the Asia-Pacific—are on course to decline to zero by 2048; that freshwater availability in the Americas has halved since the 1950s and that 42% of land species in Europe have declined in the past decade.”107 Plant extinction worldwide is happening at 500 times the natural rate of extinction, a serious threat to life on earth because of the oxygen and food plants provide.108 Concomitant with a global industrial capitalist system that has not slowed its voracious pace of destruction, climate feedback loops appear to be accelerating the ecological collapse; methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat at approximately 30 times the rate of carbon dioxide, is being released from melting permafrost in the Arctic, which could create a catastrophic positive feedback loop.109
Despite the comprehensive scientific consensus on these issues, expanding carbon-intensive infrastructure continues to be a priority for global capitalism. Several countries are building new mega-airports: the Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai will cost $32 billion and carry an estimated 160 million passengers every year; the Beijing Daxing International Airport is expected to cost $11 billion and handle 120 to 200 million passengers annually; Hamad International Airport in Doha expects to service 92 million passengers annually.110 The Panama Canal, now over a century old, recently completed a $5.25 billion expansion of its locks to accommodate new container ships known as neo-Panamax, which can carry twice as many containers as the old ships. Panama also spent billions on new metro lines, a massive new bridge over the canal to connect car traffic and trains, and doubled the size of its existing airport.111 In 2019, ground broke in Peru on construction of a new multibillion-dollar airport close to the citadel of Machu Picchu, which would ensure a greater rush of tourists to an already overburdened heritage site. Increased air traffic worldwide is accompanied by increased ocean commerce. In early 2016, the Benjamin Franklin, the largest container ship ever to dock in the United States, arrived in the port of Los Angeles, which had been modified to accommodate the vessel.112 A 2009 study determined that just 15 of the largest container ships at the time created as much pollution as 760 million cars, and pollution from the 90,000 cargo ships in circulation at the time led to 60,000 premature human deaths every year.113 Infrastructural brutalism is therefore not only a historical legacy of modern state capitalism but a continuing production. Over the next 20 years it will either be reversed in aggregate, in what might be termed a Great Deceleration, or will be a central feature of mass, and eventually human, extinction.
Reviewing Vaclav Smil’s 2013 book Making the Modern World, Bill Gates foregrounds a fact that obviously amazed him as much as it did Smil: from 2011 to 2013, China used more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century.114 The symbolism in Gates’s attention to cement is fairly straightforward: the man whose company contributed central material and ideological components to the neoliberal era of capitalism, and who published popular texts that spread the neoliberal mythology of a smooth-functioning digitalized capitalism that would lift millions out of poverty and solve all of the ecological catastrophes capitalism itself created, was writing about a material often set in the public imaginary at an opposite pole from the postindustrial fantasy of the frictionless knowledge economy. While Gates’s purpose in writing was to signal more applications of software, in attempting to make cement “smart” and celebrating Smil’s apparent pragmatism and optimism he instead foregrounded an uncomfortable reality. Almost 40 years after the start of the home computing revolution, the most important material of industrial capitalism remains concrete, the world has not become paperless, less consumptive, more leisurely, or in any sense “more environmentally friendly,” and the future of so-called postindustrial capitalism signals a dramatic increase in the application of traditionally industrial materials. According to the 2012 OECD study Strategic Transport Infrastructure Needs to 2030, global transport infrastructure investment needs from 2010 to 2030 will cost over $11 trillion.115 The OECD estimates a doubling of global GDP over that period, which includes a doubling of air passenger traffic, a tripling of air freight, and a quadrupling of maritime container traffic.116 The Economist called this explosion of spending on conventional infrastructure “the biggest investment boom in history,”117 with much of it concentrated in the BRIC countries and almost half of that spending occurring in China. From 2003 to 2008, China spent more in real terms on infrastructure than it had for the entire twentieth century. China annually consumes 40 percent of the world’s cement and steel,118 and its construction boom extends to a variety of infrastructural escalations:
By 2020 forty Chinese cities will have subway systems, totalling 7,000 km of track—over five times the total of the USA. In 2005, China had 41,000 km of highway; in just nine years this had multiplied by two and a half times and is now the most extensive network in the world. Prior to 2003 China had no high-speed rail lines in operation; it now has a system that totals 12,000 km, the most extensive in the world, which is expected to grow to 50,000 km by 2020—enough to stretch around the world one and a quarter times. On top of this, 82 new civil airports are being built and 101 current airports are being expanded. This includes a US$14 billion behemoth in the south of Beijing that will be the size of Bermuda and will require 116,000 people to be relocated. By the end of 2015, 80 per cent of the Chinese population will live within 100 km of an airport.119
The Amur River rail bridge, set to become the first continuous link between Russia and China, is designed to significantly reduce the cost of transporting Russian iron ore to China.120 China and Russia also plan to build a $242 billion, 4,350-mile rail link between Beijing and Moscow.121 China has also expressed the desire to build a rail line through the Himalayas by 2030, connecting Tibet with South Asia.122 The freight rail line from Yiwu, China to Madrid, Spain is already the longest railway route in the world, and is one of several such lines that connect Chinese cities with European cities.
China’s current spending on infrastructure exceeds that of the US and Western Europe combined.123 An important driver of China’s current economic, domestic, and foreign policy is known variously as the New Silk Road, One Belt, One Road, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a multitrillion-dollar plan to build “railways, ports, roads, dams, pipelines and industrial corridors across dozens of countries in Asia, Europe and Africa,” with the aim of boosting China’s economy and extending its political and economic influence.124 Bruno Maçães, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Secretary of State for European Affairs in Portugal, believes the initiative “is by design a project meant to encompass the whole world and the totality of human life. No other organized project or idea can rival it in this respect.”125 China announced the plan in 2013 and has established several economic institutions, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to funnel billions in private investments into infrastructure construction annually. China’s “infrastructure diplomacy” will extend its political and economic influence in a profound array of technosocial assemblages:
On the border with Kazakhstan, the small town of Korgos in Xinjiang is being transformed into a distribution hub for Central Asia, with new rail and road links from the regional capital of Urumqi to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s biggest city, and on to Iran. Train links to Europe run via Kazakhstan from cities across China. To the south, vast new markets are designed to re-establish Kashgar—one of the busiest bazaars on the old Silk Road—as a regional gateway. Chinese firms have built roads to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and there are plans to lay railway lines through the Karakoram and Pamir mountain ranges to Pakistan, Uzbekistan and beyond. Trade flows and economic activity have yet to match the building frenzy, but no one can doubt the intent.126
To make possible some of the Belt and Road connections inside China, the government has reportedly detained as many as one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in “reeducation centers” in Xinjiang province in the northwestern region of the country. Xinjiang is a region rich in resources, including an estimated 21 billion tons of oil reserves, the largest coal reserves in China, and massive natural gas discoveries in the Tarim Basin. Many Uighurs have resisted being ruled by the Han Chinese majority that migrated to the region. Some observers describe the Chinese use of detention camps as a form of cultural genocide, in conjunction with various forms of surveillance technology, state checkpoints, torture, and forced indoctrination.
The Belt and Road Initiative incorporates cultural propaganda into its economic and infrastructural trajectories. In April 2018, Renmin University of China, based in Beijing, announced the founding of a graduate school dedicated to producing advocates for the initiative. The program offers majors in Chinese politics, economics, law, and culture. Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management announced in April 2018 the launch of a Belt and Road Institute that would educate future business leaders. As of June 2018, the Belt and Road University Alliance, a collaboration among universities dedicated to the exchange of ideas in education, science and technology, and culture along the BRI route, had 170 members. In December 2017, Kabul News TV aired an Afghan-Chinese documentary film about the BRI as an opportunity for closer ties between the two countries. In June 2017, China signed film and cultural exchange cooperation memoranda with 13 of the BRI countries; almost half of the films received by the 2017 Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) were from BRI countries, and the 2018 edition of the festival featured a week devoted to films from BRI countries, as well as the formation of the Belt and Road Film Festival Alliance, an agreement among 31 film festival organizations from 29 of the BRI countries. The 2018 Belt and Road Week at SIFF featured 154 films from 49 of the BRI countries. The 2017 China International Cartoon Creative Industry Fair also emphasized how its participants were engaging members of the BRI in efforts to share Chinese animation. In addition to Chinese animation, the Belt and Road Cultural Development Action Plan (for the years 2016 to 2020) advocates for cultural exchanges with BRI countries that include the Heilongjiang Acrobatic Troupe, the culture of Keemun black tea, traditional wood carving and painting, and Chinese Song brocades (silk).127 In March 2019, China Radio International announced a photography competition called “On the Road,” which was intended to profile life lived along the routes of the Belt and Road Initiative. That same month the third Belt and Road International Music Festival, which featured more than 800 musicians from 40 countries, was held in Shenzen. The BRI Documentary Consortium was launched in April 2019 as an organized effort to use documentary film to promote the ambitions of the BRI in cooperation with BRI nations. In the summer of 2019, the Penang Asia Comic Cultural Museum in Malaysia displayed 88 illustrations from a comic book titled Belt and Road Initiative for Win-Winism, a publication (issued in English and Mandarin) by the museum designed to promote the BRI’s relationship with Malaysia.
In May 2017, the Xinhua News Agency, the official press organ of the People’s Republic of China, released a bizarre music video to promote the Belt and Road Initiative.128 Like the US Farm Security Administration’s 1937 documentary The River (discussed in chapter 1 of this book), “Belt and Road, Sing Along” is government propaganda in service of a massive infrastructure project (though the Chinese undertaking is many times greater in scope than that of the Tennessee Valley Authority). Very much unlike The River, the “Belt and Road” video combines finger-snapping, line-dancing Chinese youth and the occasional appearance of a person in a panda costume with scenes of freight transport and nuclear power and lyrics that celebrate “mutual benefit, joint responsibility, and shared destiny.” As the song alternates between the chorus of “Whoo, Yi Dai Yi Lu, Belt and Road!” and verses that exult the initiative’s “extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits,” it becomes abundantly clear how difficult it is to capture youthful enthusiasm in the state celebration of industrial infrastructure. Infrastructure scholars often acknowledge how (intentionally) boring infrastructural objects are (and perhaps need to be), and the “Belt and Road” video illustrates the bracing contradictions between the expansion of international industrial infrastructure and buoyant youthful optimism. Not to be deterred, the New Zealand China Council announced in May 2018 its intent to develop an interactive game about the BRI.
In November 2014 at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Beijing, China formally announced its infrastructure diplomacy to foreign leaders including the US president and Japanese prime minister. In a suitably ironic twist, the gray skies of Beijing were turned blue by a government order to close factories, keep cars off the roads, and shut down schools and businesses.129 Before officially announcing to important dignitaries the largest infrastructure project in human history, China had to order the closure of its existing infrastructure so that the skies would not resemble the opening scene of Blade Runner. The Belt and Road Initiative is expected to “extend from the Pacific to the heart of Europe, stimulate some $4 trillion in investment over the next three decades, and draw in countries that account for 70 percent of the world’s energy reserves.”130 Between 2013 and 2018, the BRI accounted for $6 trillion in goods trade volume among BRI countries, and Chinese companies had more than $90 trillion in direct investment in BRI countries.131 While Western capitalism pushed global ecosystems into the sixth mass extinction, the Belt and Road Initiative, if successful and in combination with infrastructure initiatives around the world, would likely ensure a combination of overconsumption, catastrophic climate change, and ecosystem degradation from which humanity would not be able to recover. Despite the BRI’s declared intention to make the largest infrastructure project in history “green,” escalating accumulation and consumption on such a scale simply cannot produce sustainable results. In addition, as environmental lawyer Jinmei Liu notes, many BRI projects promote oil and gas extraction, and the existing government regulations are nonbinding, which ensures an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of environmental degradation.132
Of course, long before the BRI the world was hurtling toward ecological catastrophe because of the centuries-long dominance of capitalism. Capitalism is not in the least responsive to the global ecological collapse, nor can it be. Instead, capitalism continues to advance the concrete contours of industrial infrastructure, consuming vital resources, condemning millions to premature deaths, and blocking potential exit routes from its own systemic suicide. The paradox of infrastructural brutalism—what makes it so brutal—lies in the response of capitalism to its own suicidal trajectory. Some capitalists have publicly declared their preference for suicide over social transformation: the former CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, when pressed to establish greenhouse gas emission targets for his company, asked, “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”133 At the structural level, capitalism shows no signs of stepping back from the abyss; instead, some capitalists promote “technology transfer,” carbon taxes, and other failed market mechanisms as solutions to the crises before us, while most of capitalism remains determined to expand industrial urbanization, encourage myriad forms of overconsumption, and push the epistemological boundaries of the technoscientific death drive. In North America and Europe, the focus of politicians and capitalists has been on the repair and expansion of existing industrial infrastructure, much of it constructed after World War II and now reaching the end of its life cycle. The only distinction between liberal and conservative voices is whether the massive repair and expansion of infrastructure should be paid for by private or public money. Liberal and progressive commentators often discuss the need to invest public money in the repair of infrastructure—in the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimated an investment of $3.6 trillion would be necessary by 2020 to fix the nation’s crumbling industrial infrastructure134—but the public discussion of industrial infrastructure rarely exhibits the kind of complexity it requires. Some infrastructure should be retrofitted instead of repaired, for example, while other infrastructure should be expertly decommissioned or destroyed, based, at the very least, on the unfolding environmental crises. The dominant political position regarding infrastructure in capitalist countries of the Global North is the liberal desire to repair decaying infrastructure for the sake of capitalist markets; environmental concerns are smothered in the rhetoric of resilience and greening the economy, and mainstream discussions of how infrastructure affects oppressed groups is almost nonexistent. American lawyer Philip K. Howard’s remarks in the Atlantic are typical of the rush-to-repair mentality:
Lengthy environmental review is dramatically harmful to the environment. Prolonging traffic and rail bottlenecks, the Common Good report found, means that billions of tons of carbon are unnecessarily released as officials, environmentalists, and neighbors bicker over project details. America’s archaic power grid—not replaced in part because of permitting uncertainties—wastes electricity equivalent to the output of 200 coal-burning power plants. At this point, the decrepit state of America’s infrastructure means that almost any modernization, on balance, will be good for the environment. Water pipes from 100 years ago leak an estimated 2.1 trillion gallons of water per year. Faulty wastewater systems release 850 billion gallons of waste into surface waters every year. Overall, America’s infrastructure receives a D+ rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers. For every project that is environmentally controversial, such as the Keystone pipeline, there are scores of projects that would easily provide a net benefit to the environment.135
Like the ASCE reports, this type of analysis hurriedly frames the current debate over infrastructure in capitalist and modernist terms of “to repair or not to repair,” instead of seeing infrastructure as a complex assemblage of cultures, human actors, laws, economic imperatives, ecological webs, construction materials, and institutional, geographical, and ecological legacies. The problem is the resilience of global capitalism, its ability to incorporate multiple suicidal trajectories into the processes of deterritorialization. To advocate only for repair and expansion, at this critical juncture in the history of infrastructure, is short-sighted and potentially irreversible, an escalation of already-suicidal capitalist assemblages.
One of the most frequently repeated truisms in infrastructure studies is the claim that infrastructure, however defined, remains invisible until it breaks. This claim is derived from a slight misreading of Susan Leigh Star’s declaration that infrastructure is “by definition” invisible. To understand Star’s statement, it must be placed in the context of her full remarks on the topic:
People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. . . . The image becomes more complicated when one begins to investigate large-scale technical systems in the making, or to examine the situations of those who are not served by a particular infrastructure. . . . One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty.136
Later, Star includes the following in her typology of infrastructure: “The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.”137 While Star certainly foregrounds the “normally invisible quality of working infrastructure,” she also considers the nuances of how such technosocial assemblages become visible or invisible to particular subjectivities; also, obviously, “normally invisible” is not the same as always invisible, or invisible “by definition.” The reading of her work that is often repeated—to the point of becoming a cliché in the literature—is a reductive representation of Star’s position. Equally important, the reductive definition of infrastructure as inherently invisible is demonstrably false, as Brian Larkin argues in his seminal review article:
Thus many studies that begin by stating how infrastructures are invisible until they break down are fundamentally inaccurate. Infrastructures are metapragmatic objects, signs of themselves deployed in particular circulatory regimes to establish sets of effects. It is commonplace, seemingly obligatory, for almost any study of infrastructure to repeat Star’s assertion that infrastructures are “by definition invisible,” taken for granted, and that they only become visible on breakdown. But this assertion is a partial truth and, as a way of describing infrastructure as a whole, flatly untenable. Invisibility is certainly one aspect of infrastructure, but it is only one and at the extreme edge of a range of visibilities that move from unseen to grand spectacles and everything in between.138
Nikhil Anand echoes the critique of infrastructure as invisible, in his study of Mumbai’s water network, by acknowledging that infrastructures are “neither ontologically prior to politics nor are they merely effects of social organization.” That is, the alleged invisibility of infrastructure is not only contradicted by phenomenological experiences, it is also made problematic by the processual, relational nature of infrastructure being imagined, described, constructed, and maintained. “Infrastructures are flaky accretions of sociomaterial processes that are brought into being through relations with human bodies, discourses, and other things (sewage, soil, water, filtration plants),” Anand continues.139 The visibility of infrastructure is constituted in process, by interactions with humans and their discourses, and with nonhuman objects and animals. Anand’s work also problematizes the belief held in some quarters that infrastructure visibility in the Global South exposes a homogeneous poverty and breakdown that sits opposite the Global North and its presumably invisible and functioning infrastructure. In recent years, several examples of infrastructure failure in the United States—the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Minnesota, contaminated water from neglected pipes in Flint, Michigan, and the near-catastrophic breach of the Oroville Dam spillway in northern California, for example—have “challenged our imagined geographies of breakdown, abandonment, and infrastructural development.”140 Visibility no longer indicates a definitive correlation between regional wealth and operational or dysfunctional infrastructure.141
Absent from much of infrastructure studies is a consideration of the substantial visibility of infrastructure in artistic texts, both contemporary and historical. Indeed, most of this book analyzes artistic texts—novels, films, photographs, television shows—that focus primarily on the “range of visibilities” of infrastructure, often in ways that interrogate the hegemonic narratives of capitalism and the state form. Even the infrastructure that is built to be buried—pipes, wires, and the stuff that undergirds cities, for example—becomes visible in ways other than breakdown: for example, from 1805 to 1812, Pierre Bruneseau explored the sewers of Paris, and by the 1867 World Exposition there were public tours available; today, one can visit Les Égouts de Paris (the Sewer Museum of Paris). Or consider the paintings of the prolific eighteenth-century French artist Hubert Robert, such as Aqueduct in Ruins or Bridge over a Cascade, which depict a neoclassical fascination with the sublimity of Roman ruins and Parisian futurity in apocalyptic destruction. All infrastructure is visible first as infrastructural imaginary, government policy, or corporate planning, then as design, then as massive construction phase, then in operation, then as ruins; artistic interventions depict the full range of engagements with infrastructure, from the formulation of an idea to the often-troubled construction to the historical legacies. The processes of conception and construction are, of course, reciprocal, each informing the other. It is no longer sufficient to repeat the claim that infrastructure is “by definition” invisible, or that it only becomes visible when it breaks; instead, let us consider how infrastructure is always visible to and for some, and how art in particular can contribute to the subtle or dramatic shifts in public perceptions of infrastructure, especially in the context of late capitalism and global ecological collapse. Infrastructure has become so visible, in fact, that the conventional definition no longer accounts for the true scope of what Keller Easterling calls infrastructural space:
Infrastructure is considered to be a hidden substrate—the binding medium or current between objects of positive consequence, shape, and law. Yet today, more than grids of pipes and wires, infrastructure includes pools of microwaves beaming from satellites and populations of atomized electronic devices that we hold in our hands. The shared standards and ideas that control everything from technical objects to management styles also constitute an infrastructure. Far from hidden, infrastructure is now the overt point of contact and access between us all—the rules governing the space of everyday life.142
The “waves and radiation” that American author Don DeLillo made famous as a Buddhist vision of the dead speaking to the living in his 1986 novel White Noise has become formalized by cultural observers such as Easterling as the infrastructure of modernity beyond the “pipes and wires,” perhaps no longer mysterious because of its enduring banal interface with the everyday. What DeLillo framed as a component of postmodern spiritualism Easterling sees 30 years later as something almost too visible to be mystifying. Infrastructure is visible until it breaks, either because the break disrupts a pattern of semiotic recognition most people understand (capitalist modernity, the myth of progress, and other ideological commitments that make invisible the necropolitical valences, ecological collapse, mass extinction, and so on), or because the break is the periodic disruption that makes constitution of the dominant narrative possible.
Nicole Starosielski recommends we see fiber optic infrastructure “as a material system whose visibility must be continually constructed in order to maintain a smooth and effective sphere of global communication.”143 Instead of figuring a universal infrastructure as always already invisible, Starosielski examines what she calls the “the production of ‘existing visibilities,’ the visual traces of cable infrastructure as it surfaces in public space and material environments, and how this visibility is negotiated in relation to specific local circumstances.”144 Infrastructural visibility must be produced and negotiated through semio-materialist practices, of which the circulation of artistic expressions is a prominent component. Sometimes, as in the example of some cable infrastructure, infrastructure is made (in)visible in specific ways to perpetuate the operationality of the infrastructure.145 Starosielski complicates the continuum of “unseen to grand spectacle,” proposed by Larkin, and the invisibility produced by banal, repetitive operation, astutely described by Geoffrey Bowker, Star, and others.146 The simple binary of visible and invisible gives way in the work of Starosielski and others to a multiplicity of possibilities. While occasionally recognized as a “mode of infrastructural visibility,”147 art is often ignored in the literature of infrastructure studies when considering the primary objects and ideas that constitute a particular mode.
As a vital component of infrastructural visibility, art (or culture, if you like) participates in both of what Harvey, Jensen, and Morita call “engineered (i.e. planned and purposefully crafted) or non-engineered (i.e. unplanned and emergent) activities.”148 The engineered activities often include government propaganda, and nonengineered activities include the emergent art forms that circulate within the context of infrastructure propagation, reflect and inform its construction, and sometimes become the ideological basis for resisting its creation. Harvey, Jensen, and Morita call this circulation “a recursive movement in which forms of infrastructure generate effects that loop back upon society, organizations, and people, re-shaping them in turn.”149 The provocative possibility for intentional sociotechnical transformation might not always exist in the apparently anomalous breakdowns of infrastructure, but instead “with gaps, interstices, and zones of opacity as infrastructural facts, which raise questions concerning the kinds of ordering these apparent ‘flow-stoppers’ participate in and how they do so.”150 Indeed, the opacity or indeterminacy of an infrastructural assemblage might exist in the affective coordination of maintenance, the dark money that generates reactionary politics, or the insurgent desire of revolutionary actions. Artistic media such as films, photography, and literature can capture, interrogate, and circulate the transversal properties of infrastructural indeterminacy more effectively than engineering studies, government propaganda, or capitalist entrepreneurship.
Prominent scholars in infrastructure studies have identified the importance of culture in infrastructural assemblages, but the field has not devoted much serious consideration to the question of how culture is or has been important. Starosielski, whose excellent work on cable infrastructures was discussed above, places considerable emphasis on historical and cultural matrices that traverse the geographic and engineering lines of flight in cable infrastructure. In The Undersea Network, she articulates four types of stories that commonly frame cable infrastructure in her ethnographic research: connection, disruption, nodal, and transmission narratives, the latter two of which move beyond simple discourses of cable connection or repair.151 By situating cable infrastructures in the discursive environment of popular culture and therefore beyond the instance of their construction, nodal and transmission narratives “extend the spatial and temporal parameters for cable discourse, suggest new lines of causality in global network development, and set the groundwork for further engagement with operational cable systems.” By doing so, “these narratives short-circuit the ideological power conducted by narratives of connection and disruption.”152 Attention to infrastructural narratives can be as powerful as, or more powerful than, the materials used in construction, potentially disrupting hegemonic cultural legacies and contributing to new practices. Architect Keller Easterling figures hegemonic stories as “ingrained expectations” that “have the power to buckle concrete and bend steel, and they can often be difficult to escape.”153 Ned Rossiter, discussing the interplay of modern software logistics and infrastructure and the ways in which they coproduce the infrastructural spaces of Easterling’s “extrastatecraft,” believes a confrontation with such neoliberal spaces must possess “an alternative logistical fiction that imagines a repurposing of the infrastructures that make us who we are.”154 The scale of software logistics and infrastructure requires “a scaling of our political imagination to grasp the distribution both of technology and the human.”155 The “logistical nightmare” of Rossiter’s proposed confrontation with the infrastructural future understands the centrality of culture to its ambitions: “What we now need to do is devise a grammar of connection between different types of spatial imagination and forge new territories toward a politics of operation.”156
Cultural narratives are not simply abstractions borne of infrastructural capacity, the playthings of a mind given time to think because the grid is operational. These narratives have provided state capitalism with an almost unchecked ability to dig, pour, nail, drill, and paint its way to mass extinctions. But infrastructural narratives will also be part of any resistance to this suicidal trajectory. Stephanie LeMenager, in her brilliant book Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, argues that “the narrative arts will be key actors in establishing the ecological resilience of the human species.”157 Historian Christopher F. Jones believes infrastructural narratives are an essential component of energy regime transformation, based on his study of the emergence of oil in the northeastern United States:
A common assumption is that we can simply replace coal-fired power plants with wind turbines and expect everything else to remain the same. History suggests otherwise. To plan more effective and equitable energy transitions, we need to incorporate a broader range of perspectives. In addition to discussing technological developments and economic costs, we must consider society and culture; humanists, social scientists, and citizens should be at the table alongside technical experts.158
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle look to art in their mapping of contemporary capitalism. This is not a frivolous exercise, they argue, but an attempt to find pivots or weaknesses in global capitalism, from which revolutionary politics can articulate strategic movements. “What is at stake is the figurability or representability of our present and its shaping effect on political action,” they argue. “In a strong interpretation, the mapping of capitalism is a precondition for identifying any ‘levers,’ nerve-centres, or weak links in the political anatomy of contemporary domination.”159 My book follows this trajectory, not in a singular pursuit of weaknesses in contemporary capitalism but instead toward theoretical multiplicities that interrogate academic disciplinary assumptions, find generative homologies between infrastructural and narrative forms, and offer radical transit in the transversal escape routes from systemic suicide. The general purpose of examining art and infrastructure in this book is to critique their hegemonic relationship; the purpose of critique, in this context, is, to use Deleuze’s definition, “not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.”160 A sensibility informed by the myth of progress and unrelenting capitalist exploitation created the current conditions. There is now little time to change that sensibility. While some of the art under consideration reifies hegemonic discourses of settler capitalism, and therefore serves as examples of oppressive infrastructural discourses, some of the works explored in this book act as “points of departure to change the world,” in Santiago Zabala’s words, “a world that needs new interpretations instead of better descriptions.”161
Only a revolutionary examination of existing infrastructure, retrofitting of carbon-intensive infrastructure, decommissioning of untenable infrastructure that requires expert knowledge, and sabotaging of the infrastructure that is too dangerous to keep is capable of transforming conditions currently so brutal that they incur mass extinction. These forms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization must be part of resistance to infrastructural brutalism. No single tactic of resistance can achieve the massive transformation necessary in the next 20 years. The relational epistemology embraced by this book emerged from the radical struggles of nineteenth-century European socialism, in ways that closely resemble contemporary assemblage theory. The following discussion therefore frames the methodological premises of the book in the context of the anarchist tradition, to demonstrate the historical commingling of revolutionary politics, assemblage theory, and infrastructural brutalism.162 Concomitant with the revolutions of the nineteenth century, workers were transforming Europe with infrastructural megaprojects, especially in the Haussmannization of Paris, and radical thinkers were publishing treatises on technology and its relational properties. Kristin Ross reminds us that a substantial number of the Communards who occupied Paris for 71 days in 1871 “were the semiskilled day laborers (journaliers) who had migrated from the provinces to work on Haussmann’s massive and fantastic urban-renewal projects.”163 By 1870, the Haussmannization of Paris had cost 2.5 billion francs and involved one-fifth of the workers in Paris.164 Therefore, infrastructure played an important but often overlooked role in one of the most important European revolutions of the modern period. Around the same time, Italian refugees and workers traveled to Egypt to build the Suez Canal and develop anarcho-syndicalist currents within the diverse Egyptian labor movement. Following this migration to Egypt, in the early twentieth century anarchists in Egypt promoted an internationalist agenda that countered the oppressions of capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism.165 Egypt became part of an international network of anarcho-syndicalism. The renovation of Paris and the construction of the Suez Canal are two examples of infrastructure and revolutionary politics converging, and certainly there is more work to be done in recovering additional histories of this kind. It is also worth noting the substantial loss of life suffered by working communities in the construction of infrastructure, something often neglected in the study of infrastructure: for example, over 30,000 workers died in the construction of the Panama Canal; 12,000 to 16,000 forced laborers died in the construction of the Burma Railway, representations of which are discussed in chapter 4 of this book; and the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the subject of Anne Michaels’s novel The Winter Vault, cost 500 workers their lives. In terms of revolutionary history, infrastructure has put tremendous burdens on working people while escalating the dispossession of Indigenous people and the rate of primitive accumulation. Relative to the centralization of wealth and power over the past 150 years, industrial infrastructure has not improved the lives of the oppressed.
While Karl Marx is often cited as the earliest modern socialist to address the centrality of technology to industrial societies, it was in fact Proudhon who “supplie[d] the impetus for Marx’s turn to the study of machines and, more broadly, to science and technology as a terrain in which political and economic questions were increasingly salient.”166 In The Philosophy of Poverty, Proudhon declares that “what the economists ought to say is that machinery, like the division of labour, in the present system of social economy is at once a source of wealth and a permanent and fatal cause of misery.”167 Machines increase production volume (albeit at the expense of quality) and, by replacing workers, reduce wage expenses and enable the capitalist to sell cheaper on the market. But at the same time the workers’ buying power is reduced and the economy enters a crisis of overproduction. “Thus machinery, after crushing the workmen, is not slow in dealing employers a counter-blow; for, if production excludes consumption, it is soon obliged to stop itself,” Proudhon writes.168
Marx criticized Proudhon’s idealization of artisans’ biases, which ended up glorifying the mechanized independent workshop as a site at which “the antinomy of the division of labor, if not entirely destroyed, will be balanced and neutralized.”169 Yet Marx concurred that “by the introduction of machinery, the division of labour inside society has grown up, the task of the worker inside the workshop has been simplified, capital has been concentrated, human beings have been further dismembered.”170 Marx would have much more to say about capitalist accumulation, but it is evident that both he and Proudhon were coming to a similar understanding of the basic dynamic of overproduction in 1846–1847. Furthermore, Proudhon’s core account of the machine does not depend on his broader idealism and may even be read as pointing past humanism. Stood on its feet, the same account emerges more recently in STS discussions. Consider Proudhon’s definition of the machine:
What is a machine, in fact? A method of reuniting diverse particles of labor which division had separated. Every machine may be defined as a summary of several operations, a simplification of powers, a condensation of labor . . . an abridgment of manual labor which multiplies the power of the producer.171
Ethically, Proudhon links the machine to an account of liberty that identifies its positive sense with power, and he frames the machine as a liberating force. Proudhon celebrates the machine for its potency, linking it to an account of positive liberty as power. Liberty is “that power which man acquires of using his forces more easily in proportion as he frees himself from the obstacles which originally hindered the exercise thereof.”172 Negative liberty, freedom from obstacles, is here auxiliary to empowerment. On this reading, power/freedom becomes self-reinforcing even as obstacles to its exercise cease to constrain it. The combination of functions in the machine is an increase in power, and therefore a purveyor of positive liberty. Thus, “man, in inventing a machine, serves his liberty . . . because he determines it [, not just] because he removes a difficulty from its path.”173
Ontologically, however, Proudhon views the machine not as “merely a productive force” but as a locus in a lattice of forces instantiated by both human and machine agency. Hence his warning against communist proposals for state-managed production:
Machines do not go all alone: to keep them in motion it is necessary to organize an immense service around them; so that in the end, man creating for himself an amount of work proportional to the number of instruments with which he surrounds himself, the principal consideration in the matter of machinery is much less to divide its products than to see that it is fed.174
Here Proudhon most closely anticipates modern concerns with “the construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts” and the “reconstruction of social roles and relationships.”175 His account of machinery’s demands is effectively elaborated by referring to what contemporary STS scholars would call a sociotechnical assemblage. In Proudhon’s account, new machinery does not only make some workers redundant; it also brings about new configurations of bodies, machines, and their reciprocal agencies. This is a major theme in contemporary STS writings that deploy the Deleuzian concept of assemblage. Although it has more radical ontological implications than Proudhon’s idealism could contain, his emphasis on the relationality of machinery places him on the same horizon of meaning with modern discussions of sociotechnical assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari treat assemblages as generic, diagrammatic configurations in and on which forces operate, an abstract but constitutive field relation of “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage.”176
Deleuze and Guattari discuss assemblage and machines in literary terms to approach a generic ontology, but this ontology has been taken up by STS scholars to discuss sociotechnical assemblages from energy infrastructures to ubiquitous surveillance and digital media. This literature draws on the various “new materialisms” that emphasize distributed agency, an “unstable cascade” of intentionalities and “the conjoined effect of a variety of kinds of bodies.”177 Assemblage theory makes room for “a general, non-anthropomorphic affectivity within dynamic systems,”178 in which power is distributed among humans, nonhuman actors, and objects. It thus transcends enlightenment humanism and its constructions of agency and subjectivity.
Marx, too, approaches assemblage thinking in his later work. David Harvey, contradicting the popular interpretation of Marx as a technological determinist, describes Marx’s analysis as bringing together “mental conceptions, social relations and technologies” in a totality which is not Hegelian but “more like an ecological totality, what Lefebvre refers to as an ‘ensemble’ or Deleuze as an ‘assemblage,’ of moments of coevolving in an open, dialectical manner.”179 In his later work, Marx would also come to embrace the ontological role of technology, wherein the labor process was seen as “no longer a singularly or uniquely human process.”180 As Arthur Bradley explains:
If Marx starts out from the neo-Aristotelian position that human species-being makes and uses tools in order to fulfill preconceived ends—this is the species difference between human labour, on the one hand, and the labour of bees or spiders, on the other—he ends up arguing that the tool, in turn, generates new ends—new needs, new instincts, new ideas—that did not pre-exist its use: “the satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been required, leads to new needs.”181
Bradley argues that what remain for a “Marxian philosophy of technology” to determine, once some kind of human-technology reciprocity is assumed, “are not the false dualisms of humanism or technocentrism, agency or determinism, cause or effect, and so on but rather what we have called the mutually constituting ‘between’ of the human-tool relation.”182 For Bradley, this makes Marx the “original thinker of originary technicity,”183 the notion that no human essence precedes the interaction with technology, or what Bradley describes as “less a tool or prosthesis that has been super-added to life nor even quite a metaphor for life but what I will call the empirico-transcendental condition of life itself.”184 This idea that technology—tools, techne, technicity—co-constitutes us from the beginning is prevalent in contemporary studies of technology; typically, however, it is accompanied by a more strident antihumanism than Marx or Proudhon would have accepted.
The ambivalence toward technology prefigured in early socialist works remained present in anarchist discourse throughout the nineteenth century. Thus while Carlo Pisacane, an Italian follower of Proudhon, was “convinced that railroads, electrical telegraphs, machinery, industrial advances, in short, everything that expands and smoothes the way for trade, is destined inevitably to impoverish the masses,”185 his countryman Carlo Cafiero called for the “introduction on an immense scale of machines of all kinds” to serve workers, produce a surfeit of necessities, and dispel the notion that socialism was impractical.186 Similarly, even though Bakunin praised science for positing “true abstractions which express the general nature and logic of things” and thus foresaw its becoming “society’s collective consciousness,” he also warned against its “claim to the governance of societies,” with the social engineering implicit in Comte and Marx.187 Peter Kropotkin, however, most often expressed an optimistic belief in the revolutionary potential of technology, and promoted industrialization through a “general education” in “science and handicraft alike.”188 In Fields, Factories and Workshops, he celebrates the coevolution of agriculture and industrial manufacturing: “Agriculture calls manufacturers into existence, and manufactures support agricultures. Both are inseparable; and the combination, the integration of both things brings about the grandest results.”189 He calls for “more technical education,” which will be “a boon for humanity.”190 Kropotkin was by no means celebrating hard labor, of course; in his discussion of the “Paris gardener,” Kropotkin describes “our ambition” to “produce even more” than the Paris gardener with “less labour,” and to “enjoy all the joys of human life.”191 But his understanding of scientific “progress” is deeply problematic, tinged with the belief that “the resources of science” are “inexhaustible.”192 Kropotkin avowed: “Whenever a saving of human labour can be obtained by means of a machine, the machine is welcome and will be resorted to; and there is hardly one single branch of industry into which machinery work could not be introduced with great advantage, at least at some stages of the manufacture.”193
As George Woodcock rightly observes, “Kropotkin’s was essentially—and perhaps rather surprisingly—an anthropocentric vision of a developing world.”194 What Woodcock describes as “the sharp limitations” of Kropotkin’s outlook emerge from modern environmentalists’ benefit of hindsight, as the twentieth century witnessed the catastrophic results of peaking resource use and sinks. While today most people cannot completely and immediately sever themselves from vast infrastructural assemblages, once aware of the destructive processes involved, their affective relationship with these assemblages becomes at best a sense of unease and at worst an almost suicidal anxiety. Thus, when Murray Bookchin, almost a century after Kropotkin, advocates the embrace of technology to “reawaken man’s sense of dependence upon the environment” by freeing human beings from menial labor, his techno-optimism seems somewhat outdated.195
The mid-twentieth century, however, saw many anarchists adopt analyses of technology written by nonanarchist authors including Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, and E. F. Schumacher and address technologies such as the atom bomb, birth control, and television, which had qualitatively different scales and capacities for destruction and liberation. As a result, we see a distinct shift in priorities, from the nineteenth-century celebration of the productive (and therefore liberatory) capacities of certain industrial technology (matched, of course, with decentralized forms of governance) to the twentieth-century call for “a break with systems of so-called ‘high technology’” and an ecocentric celebration of small, convivial, intermediate technologies. John Clark provides a succinct list of characteristics for these more “appropriate” technological complexes:
low consumption of resources; utilization of widely dispersed, renewable energy sources; minimal disturbance of ecosystems; human scale; comprehensibility; compatibility with aesthetic values; feasibility of continual reassessment and fundamental redesign in relation to analysis of needs; multifunctionality; capacity to fulfill basic human needs; tendency to reduce artificial scarcities; incompatibility with technocratic and bureaucratic structures; compatibility with democratic control of society, decentralized decision-making, and nonhierarchical social structures; conduciveness to production processes involving enjoyment, creativity, and human development.196
This list of desiderata is laudable by most measures. Yet a contemporary anarchist politics of technology must consider technological reconstruction without neglecting the legacies of past technologies (the longue durée of sociotechnical materiality). The material tendencies of our petromodern era ensure that whatever the future holds, it cannot be like the past; there is no linear descent from the peak curve into pristine conditions, no parlor trick to make centuries of ruinous structures evaporate without a trace, no time machine capable of reversing the Columbian exchange, no space on earth that is exclusive of nuclear contamination, global warming, or the toxic drift of industrial living. Hence, even as we build technosocial assemblages appropriate for life beyond capitalism, we cannot project their proliferation in society as a blueprint onto a blank canvas. Any anarchist politics of technology must contend with a world that is always already toxic and in various stages of collapse. A more generative anarchist approach to technology might therefore emphasize experimentation with new conjunctions of humans and nonhuman actors. To ask how both literal and abstract machines connect flows of desire and produce habit-forming potentials takes the matter beyond an ethically bounded techno-optimism to a plane where analyzing actual relationalities in the sociotechnical assemblage can aid reconstruction, desertion, and sabotage.
Instead of seeing urban spaces, for example, as atomized blocks of petromodern ruins, we could use the concept of assemblage to understand “the spatially processual, relational and generative nature of the city, where ‘generative’ refers both to the momentum of historical processes and political economies and to the eventful, disruptive, atmospheric, and random juxtapositions that characterize urban space.”197 Thus, the city becomes “a place that is not just inhabited but which is produced through that inhabiting,” a constitution of urban space that Colin McFarlane calls “dwelling.”198 Urban space in the context of collapse, especially, is invested with fluid potentialities, such as urban gardening, scavenging or squatting, radical orientations to the city that do not privilege assigned neoliberal purposes but rather destabilize those purposes through new forms of “cofunctioning.”199 Assemblage theory applied to an anarchist politics of infrastructure suggests, therefore, a more radical ontology than lists of static features of technologies appropriate for a liberated society. It “implies a greater conceptual openness to the unexpected outcomes of disparate intentions and activities,”200 juxtaposed with expectations of unproblematic social reconstruction with “appropriate” technologies. In particular, assemblage thinking emphasizes “the depth and potentiality of sites and actors in terms of their histories, the labour required to produce them, and their inevitable capacity to exceed the sum of their connections.”201 This “depth,” especially in terms of the legacies of technological systems, will be particularly important in the age of collapse, because it offers a better understanding of the materialities and capacities of systems that break down, and opens up possibilities of reuse, salvage, and reconstitution which will become all-important under rapidly deteriorating conditions.
The chapters of this book are arranged according to artistic genres that engage infrastructural poetics: “drowned town” fiction, the road movie, energy landscape photography, and death train narratives in film and literature. The first chapter examines the literature of the United States and Canada for “drowned town” fictions, stories about the arrival of hydroelectric projects during and after the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Drowned town fiction frequently performs what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” a nonnative quotidian gesture that naturalizes “settler jurisdiction” and other modes of occupation without treating the dispossession of Indigenous people. In such stories, white settler nostalgia for a mythical landscape before the flooding, or for a mythical agrarian culture, overrides the structural violence that accompanies large dam construction.
Chapter 2 considers road movies in terms of protocological control, Alexander Galloway’s term for the ways in which technicity under liberal governmentality restricts freedom. Film studies has largely ignored the material properties of the road in its examination of the road movie genre. A subgenre of the road movie, the existential road movie, foregrounds the road as a fatalistic inevitability, but in doing so often erases “transportation racism,” the racist violence of highway construction. The postapocalyptic road movie envisions the end of liberal governmentality and speculates about the possibilities for life and death in the absence of the state form. This chapter concludes with literary representations of the road that are told from nonhuman perspectives, a point of view the road movie genre has yet to engage.
Chapter 3 examines the agency and ruination of oil capitalism through the lens of energy landscape photography. The media of oil capitalism often obscure the pervasive destruction of this economic system, from resource wars and toxic human bodies to the mechanized slaughter of nonhuman animals and the abandoned infrastructure of orphaned oil wells. The artistic media considered in this chapter consider the processes of ruination in the context of durable infrastructure assemblages that produce a sense of ideological continuity and structural benevolence. The chapter explores the photography of Warren Cariou, Edward Burtynsky, and Mitch Epstein, as well as other media such as the television show True Detective, in an effort to define possible futures under the material duress of oil capitalism and its remains.
Chapter 4 assesses the necropolitics of the death train narrative, stories in which the construction or use of a railroad results in mass death. Colonial empires exploited railways for mechanized, rapid forms of primitive accumulation, a practice that continues today. From the Ugandan “Lunatic Express” to the mid-twentieth-century atrocities of the Burma Railway and the Nazi Holocaust, ending with fictional postapocalyptic death train narratives in Snowpiercer and Train to Busan, this chapter foregrounds the necropolitical valences of state and capitalist logistics. From the early 3D film Bwana Devil to the cinematic classic The Bridge on the River Kwai, the recent Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the popular postapocalyptic films mentioned above, a wide range of death train narratives capture the genocidal infrastructural violence of the railway and its impact on potential forms of liberatory politics.
The conclusion outlines the need for what I am calling brisantic politics, a culture of unmaking capable of slowing the advance of capitalist suicide. Brisance refers to the shattering effect of an explosive, but in this instance encompasses a wide range of practices dedicated to defeating infrastructural power from an antiauthoritarian perspective. The capacity to slow industrial capitalism’s ecological devastation and human subjugation requires a reorientation of radical politics toward infrastructure, sabotage, and the unpredictability of cascading destruction in an intensely interconnected world. Indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL), the Italian No TAV (Treno ad Alta Velocità) movement, and the struggle of the Indigenous Munduruku nation against the São Manoel hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon all represent revolutionary attempts to disrupt or destroy important infrastructural assemblages. The “shattering effect” of brisantic politics need not be in the form of actual explosives; rather, this form of radical response to infrastructural brutalism embodies ideas, materialities, and assemblages whose trajectory extends in the direction of unbuilding the most egregious examples of necropolitical capitalist infrastructure, by interrupting, retrofitting, sabotaging, or destroying the infrastructure in question. The future will be brutal, but we can engage in the project of making it less so.