Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
—Karl Marx
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.
—Walter Benjamin
All past revolutions have failed because they couldn’t take the engine.
—Curtis, protagonist in Snowpiercer (2013)
The “death train” narrative—with its historical roots in the colonialist projects of the nineteenth century (such as the Ugandan “Lunatic Express”) and the war crimes of the mid-twentieth century such as the Burma Railway (“the Death Railway”) and the Nazi Holocaust—foregrounds the necropolitical valences of state and capitalist logistics and the industrialized expansion of capitalist accumulation. In addition to the actual death trains—historical events in which either the construction of a railway or the operation of one resulted in mass casualties—the death train is also a potent metaphor for the structural violence of industrial capitalism: in 2003, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army referred to the World Trade Organization as a “death train” that must be “derailed.”1 The death train of logistical and infrastructural violence in the era of late capitalism threatens to expand its access and velocity within an already suicidal global system. The railways may have had multiple and varied social, psychological, and ecological impacts on the colonial period, but they were absolutely essential to the creation and expansion of empire and in the formation of the postcolonial states that succeeded empire.2 “Railway imperialism” transformed societies and imposed imperial interests on domestic politics: “The locomotive clearly had a unique propensity for integrating and annexing territory, for monopolizing its resources, and for preempting the future of great stretches of country.”3 Rail lines such as the Uganda Railway, which linked interior Uganda and Kenya with the port of Mombasa, followed a pattern common to imperial railways: these railways embedded imperialist interests by connecting “promising pastoral and agricultural areas to ports,” which captured the economic activities of colonies within the export-import dynamics of the empire and thereby ensured an economic form of subordination to the colonies’ “chief imperial financier and trading partner.”4 The 30,000 miles of rail constructed in India, for example, made the Indian supply of “raw cotton, wheat, jute, and tea in return for British cotton textiles and manufacturers” a more valuable colonial exploit to Britain than was Canada or Australia; while not improving the lives of Indian peasants, the railway “affiliated Indian landlords and bankers politically as well as economically with the Raj.”5 While colonial apologists often frame the railroad in places such as India as some kind of gift from the British, the history of rail construction in India was comprehensively dictated by colonial interests:
The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country.” In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns double those of government stocks, paid entirely from Indian, and not British, taxes. It was a splendid racket for Britons, at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.
The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources—coal, iron ore, cotton and so on—to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time.
And, of course, racism reigned; though whites-only compartments were soon done away with on grounds of economic viability, Indians found the available affordable space grossly inadequate for their numbers. . . .
Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to “protect investments.” This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early 20th century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men—whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England.6
The necropolitical features of the colonial railroad in India became most visible during the Great Drought of the 1870s, one of the late Victorian holocausts discussed by Mike Davis. Instead of providing a technosocial bulwark against the Indian famine from 1876 to 1878, the new railroads were “instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters).”7 Over a century later, in 2017, in the US state of Florida, as Hurricane Irma approached and residents were told to evacuate, the significantly diminished and privatized passenger trains in the state were not used to assist with the evacuation, arguably another example of railroads and necropolitics intersecting during a natural catastrophe. The railway was also an integral infrastructure in the spread of white settler colonialism and the brutal subjugation of Indigenous people in the Americas and Africa.8 As Manu Karuka astutely notes, what he calls “railroad colonialism” sought to restrict forms of resistance to “the death threat of imperialism,” and the capitalists and politicians who invested in colonial railroads “invested in the futures of colonialism.”9 Not only the rail lines but also the bureaucracies and logistical tendencies embedded in railroad colonialism expanded and sometimes anticipated the necropolitical governance structures, mobilities, and extractive flows of colonialism. “Railroad promoters anticipated the exchange value of Indigenous lands,” writes Karuka, “even before the onset of colonial jurisdiction.”10
The structural violence of railroad colonialism also extended to working people in Britain, by the ways in which the railways paralleled the class system in their provision of mobility and comfort to the bourgeoisie.11 The necropolitical features of the railway included its role in expanding the working class and establishing an exploitative financial regime:
The railways not only helped continue the class system by defining new types of discrimination but also led to massive expansion of the working class. They enabled the migration of huge swathes of the population from land-based employment or subsidence farming to paid work for capitalist businesses, not only for the railway companies themselves but for the huge supply chain that grew up to service them as well as a wide range of other industries needing large amounts of labor. The railways not only allowed people to live further away from work, but also stimulated the development of the financing system on which capitalism’s growth depended. Indeed, the expansion and spread of capitalism paralleled that of the railway. The construction of the railways was the biggest enterprise ever undertaken—certainly since the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman roads and aqueducts, and arguably far greater than any of those—and to support this huge construction program, a banking and finance system had to be created.12
In addition to enabling colonial infrastructures and expanding the materialities of capitalism, the railways also provided economic efficiencies for the slave trade system that allowed for its continuation.13 Construction of the railway systems in the southern United States relied heavily on the use of slave labor: “The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, in 1856, would have ranked the sixth largest plantation in Virginia, and the Southwestern Railroad in 1850 would have been the third largest plantation in Georgia.”14 A century of colonial brutality owes much of its existence to the necropolitical contours of the railways, and where anticolonial struggles were successful one still often finds the residue of colonial infrastructural violence.
Simultaneous with its pivotal material and ideological role in the construction of the early colonial period, the railway was integral to evolving artistic media of the epoch. Writer and painter Théophile Gautier described the railway stations where trains congregated as the new center of the universe: “These cathedrals of the new humanity are the meeting points of nations, the centre where all converges, the nucleus of the huge stars whose iron rays stretch out to the ends of the earth.”15 J. M. W. Turner’s 1844 painting Rain, Steam and Speed exhibited an early fascination with railway mobility, the elemental force of steam power, and the confusion of the senses produced by new mobilities. When William Powell Frith’s painting The Railway Station was exhibited in 1862 in a small art gallery next to the Haymarket Theatre, it attracted 1,000 spectators per day, and as many as 80,000 viewers in total; the painting’s provenance and contemporary promotion made it a “leap of capitalist faith”16 and an emblem of the railway’s place in modernist iconography. By the time of Édouard Manet’s 1873 painting The Railway, modernity’s iconic machine could be invoked by nothing more than a cloud of steam behind a wrought-iron fence. Trains were not only a common feature of nineteenth-century literature, they also came to define the genre of literature, fiction and nonfiction, known as “railway reading,” determined by the contemplative time of rail travel.17 Lynne Kirby maps the railroad as both “preexisting and coexisting” with the birth of cinema; she connects the “train’s representation in the cinema to the train’s historical and ideological functions, to national differences, and to social-sexual factors bearing on an understanding of the train’s popular representation.”18 Trains are also prominent in early cinema, such as the Lumière brothers’ 1895 silent black-and-white documentary L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station), and Kirby correctly associates a signature film camera movement, the tracking shot, with the technological apparatus of the railroad.19 The “fundamental paradox” of the railroad experience, “simultaneous motion and stillness,”20 parallels the illusion created by automobility, compared with the VR experience earlier in this book. As it contributed to colonial violence, the railroad became what Kirby calls a “protocinematic phenomenon, a significant cultural force influencing the emergence and development of the cinema during the silent period in both the United States and Europe.”21 The striations of the colonial apparatus produced sustained perceptual tendencies, not entirely surprising given the fact that both “cinema and the railway offer more or less predetermined and repeatable spatio-temporal continuities.”22 Perhaps it is no coincidence that revolutionary visions of derailment, such as in the film Snowpiercer discussed later in this chapter, coexist with the “slow cinema” movement, the long take as a historical counterpoint to the tracking shot and its embryonic futurism.
In Mbembe’s definition of necropolitics, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”23 Building railways produces new forms of capitalist accumulation and surplus populations, from the dispossession of Indigenous people to the slave trade and modern extractive industries. As Patrick Wolfe famously described settler colonialism: “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.”24 The necropolitical force of the settler’s railways in North America, South Asia, Africa, and elsewhere endures and poses an existential obstacle to Indigenous communities. Whatever else railways are for in settler societies, their primary purpose is always integrated with the settler “logic of elimination” and therefore in service of “access to territory.”25 The point here is not that Indigenous communities must refuse the railway, but that railways bisect and circumscribe Indigenous lands and continue the colonial project of resource extraction and the mobilization of state violence. “Settler colonialism destroys to replace,” writes Wolfe. Decolonization might require the destruction of many railways, to disrupt the flow of capital and deny certain forms of state striation. For the contemporary liberal order, necropower depends on industrial infrastructure and its logistical comportment for the operation and extension of the suicidal state.26 Railways, formerly the principal technosocial pillar of colonial militarism and capitalist accumulation, have ironically become symbols of “green” capitalism, a seemingly benign form of transportation when compared with more carbon-intensive alternatives such as cars and airplanes. The signature technology of celebrated capitalist Elon Musk, the Hyperloop underground transit system, may be a concept at least as old as the Beach Pneumatic Subway constructed in New York City in 1870, or the pod cars from the 1976 film Logan’s Run, but variations of rail technologies now represent forward-looking infrastructure that is relatively clean, fast, and invisible. Hyperloops and high-speed trains continue the structure of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination, less carbon-intensive infrastructure that extends the deeply entrenched striations of centuries of colonial advances. Whether these railways, old or new, can be part of a decolonized future remains secondary to the necessity to slow and even reverse the ecocidal march of global capitalism in the coming decades.
As described by Michael Dillion and Julian Reid, so-called critical infrastructures within the liberal world order constitute essential elements of life under those regimes and are defended in the name of prolonging the technosocial regime instead of protecting human life.27 For example, the reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure after the war against the Islamic State will cost $45.7 billion, according to the World Bank.28 Iraqi officials estimated the cost at $88 billion, at a 2018 conference in Kuwait attended by dozens of countries.29 Relief for the human casualties of imperialist interventions are of little concern to global capitalism, but rebuilding critical infrastructure almost anywhere attracts corporate bids from around the world. Dillion and Reid also emphasize how the interconnectedness of global infrastructure systems provides a conduit for anxieties over their fragility: “Attacks on, or indeed the mere breakdown of, one infrastructure system . . . serve to increase anxiety about every infrastructure system and transnational infrastructures tout court.”30 This fear of infrastructural breakdown, a ruling-class concern probably mirrored in the population over which they rule, is especially severe for the ruling class because of its “acute appreciation that the capacity to govern is dependent upon the smooth and uninterrupted functioning of infrastructures.”31 In the context of the contemporary liberal order, therefore, human life matters primarily for logistical opportunities in the preservation and extension of infrastructure,32 which reframes colonial priorities in terms that privilege the logic of elimination over the colonizers themselves. This is the end stage of colonization, the suicidal state form that privileges its own suicide over the lives of the oppressors, for colonialism would rather die than pass on a world in decline to the colonized. Colonialism would sooner end the world than end its reign.
The 1952 film Bwana Devil is loosely based on the building of the Uganda Railway in British East Africa, and its story of man-eating lions who attacked Indian migrants working on the railroad was filmed again in 1996 as the lamentable The Ghost and the Darkness starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. Bwana Devil is more famous for its original audience than for its pioneering but flawed deployment of 3D effects. An image of the audience wearing 3D glasses at the premiere of Bwana Devil, taken by Life photographer J. R. Eyerman, later appeared on the famous cover of an English translation of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle explain the problematic legacy of the famous unauthorized cover:
This image casts the theory of the spectacle as an ocular-centric discourse and suggests that life under its spell resembles the experience of sitting passively in a darkened cinema, living vicariously through the actions of the characters on screen, with the added indignity of wearing silly glasses. It directs struggle and critique to the world of leisure and consumption rather than production.33
For Debord, however, The Society of the Spectacle demonstrated “the autocratic reign of the market economy,”34 its operation in every niche of everyday life, and he described the continuation of Western imperialism in Africa as “still the true master of the economy,”35 an acknowledgment of the enduring politics of colonial infrastructure. The image of the Bwana Devil audience transformed popular perception of Debord’s classic Situationist treatise into an attack on passive spectatorship, but little attention has been given to the film being watched by the audience in the photo. Why should the film matter? In part, because Bwana Devil draws our attention to the logistical and hyperindustrial base of modern capitalism. After 1968, much social theory lost sight of the machinery of territorialization and devoted extensive theoretical energies instead to understanding the intricacies of visual culture, including propaganda, public relations, advertising, television, and global screen culture more generally. The critique of screen culture is undoubtedly important, but with the Internet the interruption of screen culture becomes far more challenging; instead, critique and opposition to hegemonic visual cultures produce a dizzying array of optical noise in which intellectual clarity and sense of purpose are lost amidst the guttural braying of automated trolls and state-sponsored psy-ops. The infrastructural foundation that enables grid-driven computers and gas-powered vehicles to function, on the other hand, remains exposed and vulnerable to attack, generally not obscured by social detritus. Given a choice of trying to meme one’s way out of late-stage capitalism or organizing to disrupt extractive industries and sabotage the pipelines, roads, and railways, the facile and popular response tends to involve a laptop and not a pickaxe.
Bwana Devil returns to the setting of colonial railroad construction. The Uganda Railway was one part of what poet and journalist Edwin Arnold first described in 1874 as the “Cape to Cairo Railway,” a vision propagated by imperialist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes but never fully realized. Construction of the Uganda Railway began in 1896 in Mombasa, a port city on the coast of the Indian Ocean, and finished in 1901 in Kisumu, on the edge of Lake Victoria. By 1901, British explorer and colonial servant Sir Harry Johnston reported that because of the Uganda Railway the territory it crossed was “admirably suited for a white man’s country.”36 Bwana Devil, set in 1898, depicts some of the estimated 32,000 Indian migrants who worked on the railroad being killed by lions, which convinces the English engineers to bring in big game hunters. The hunters also fall to the lions, and it is up to the film’s American hero, Bob Hayward (Robert Stack), to kill the lions, a climax of white settler heroism that overshadows the historical deaths of almost 2,500 workers during the railway’s construction. Bwana Devil actually opens with a work stoppage on the railroad caused by a religious holiday, to which Major Parkhurst (Ramsay Hill), in charge of construction, declares, “A contract is a contract. They will work.” Parkhurst assures Bob Hayward, the chief engineer, “You know, Robert, when the trains begin to arrive, civilization will arrive too.” Hayward offers a standard colonial complaint: “Civilization. That’s a noble word. Not enough to keep me rotting here.” Between 1830 and the turn of the century, when the film is set, more than 965,000 kilometers of railway were constructed around the world.37 The characters of Bwana Devil disparage their African context, but the railways built by migrant workers primarily served the purpose of transporting “heavy loads of coal and other minerals to rivers or the sea, and later to canals, where they could be transported for far greater distances,”38 a colonial exploit that made possible the “civilization” to which the British and American in the film desire to return. Colonial rail assemblages continue to serve similar purposes over a century later, with many observers declaring the neocolonial project of a new “scramble for Africa.”39 While talk of a postindustrial age has consumed settler societies such as the United States and blinded some to the deeply entrenched mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, the hyperindustrial striations of ageing rail lines provide the foundational contours for the contemporary global petromodern energy regime. Long after the pinnacle of rail usage, almost 70 percent of US coal is carried by rail to its destination, and this is enough coal to power 78 percent of US homes.40 According to the Association of American Railroads, “In 2012, trains [in the US] carried 40 times more oil than they did in 2008, and the volume doubled again in the following year, to about 400,000 tanker-car loads.”41 In 2018, the IEA projected that crude-by-rail shipments in Canada would more than double by 2019, from 150,000 barrels per day in late 2017 to as much as 390,000 barrels per day in 2019.42 The government of China declared it would increase rail capacity for thermal coal by 150 million tonnes in 2018,43 and India produces over 600 million tonnes of coal per year, most of which is shipped by rail. The image of an audience in 3D glasses, gazes cemented to the screen, may have seemed like an apt metaphor for life in the society of the spectacle, but the film they were watching, Bwana Devil, despite its racism and shoddy effects, draws our attention back to the brutal contours of hyperindustrial infrastructure.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the depiction of rail construction in Bwana Devil, however, is the way it focuses on lions and not the savagery of the British as the cause of the violent deaths of rail workers. When the British built railroads in India, for example, the death toll among “navvies” was “startling, reaching numbers normally seen only on the battlefield.”44 This makes the reaction of Commonwealth readers to the atrocities of the Burma Railway, discussed later in this chapter with reference to Bridge on the River Kwai and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, somewhat hypocritical. More broadly, infrastructure studies needs to pay more attention to the use of slave labor in the construction of infrastructure. Railroads in many nations were constructed by slave labor. In the United States, for example, “thousands of enslaved blacks worked on the railroads right up to and during the Civil War, grading lines, building bridges and blasting tunnels. They hauled timber, cut wood and shoveled dirt and stone. Skilled slaves, especially blacksmiths, stone masons and carpenters, worked on the railroads too.”45 While great American artists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman used the railroad as a symbol of progress, both its construction and its operation incorporated the use of thousands of slaves; in the words of historian William G. Thomas, “Railroads and slavery [in the United States] became fused in a relationship that reinforced one another.”46 As the rage for railways accelerated, the prices of slaves increased; some states, such as Virginia, turned to prison labor when slaves were unavailable. The expansion of the railroad system in the southern US also modernized the system of trafficking slaves. “If cotton was the engine of slavery’s growth into the 1850s,” writes Thomas, “then railroads constituted a second phase, equally merciless, exploitative, and disturbing.”47 In the decades preceding the Civil War, “railroads appeared to enhance slavery’s social and economic potential at the very moment of its impending political eclipse.”48
The railroads in the southern US enabled the efficient movement of slaves, who also could be used as collateral for loans to build more railroads. As discussed later in this chapter, slave labor from the Soviet gulags built many of the canals and highways constructed under Stalin.49 During World War II, the Nazis forced an estimated 10,000 laborers from at least 37 labor camps to begin building the Reichsautobahn.50 Closer to the present, Amnesty International accused the nation of Qatar of employing forced labor to build the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup;51 the International Trade Union Confederation estimates 4,000 migrant workers will die in the construction of tournament infrastructure before the 2022 World Cup, if no intervention is attempted.52 The history of infrastructure and forced or slave labor deserves an extended consideration, certainly more than this brief interlude can offer, and such a study might consider the connections between authoritarianism and infrastructure, past and present. International Container Terminal Services, Inc. chairman and president Enrique Razon Jr., one of the richest men in the Philippines, remarked in 2017, “The countries with the best infrastructure in the world are dictatorships.”53 He qualified the comment by saying he was not endorsing a particular form of politics, but his sentiment probably reflects the orientation of most capitalists and other authoritarians. There are the obvious reasons authoritarians admire infrastructure projects: these projects tend to solidify social relations in ways that advantage the ruling class, and they simultaneously provide what Ingrid Burrington calls a “tremendous display of power.”54 But there has yet to be a study of the political economy of infrastructure projects and how they lend themselves to the use of slave labor. Similarly, infrastructure studies could use more dedicated research on the relationship between (antiauthoritarian) revolution and infrastructure.55
Among the most famous infrastructure projects involving slave labor, the Burma Railway also represents a rare instance of infrastructural slave labor immortalized by notable artistic depictions. Electrical engineer, spy, and novelist Pierre Boulle authored Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï (The Bridge over the River Kwai), which won the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1952; it was adapted as the 1957 award-winning film Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean. A host of memoirs and memorials dedicated to the slave laborers who built this railroad appeared in the early 2000s, and Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North was published in 2014. This period of memorializing the dead who built the Death Railway also included films such as To End All Wars (2001) and The Railway Man (2013). The Burma Railway, the “Death Railway” that attempted to connect Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbuyuzayat in Burma in 1942 and 1943, was an attempt to build 415 kilometers of railway using approximately 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and 200,000 Southeast Asian civilians as slave laborers. An estimated 12,000 POWs and 60,000 Asian civilians died under horrific conditions.
Narrative depictions of the Death Railway are connected by the ways in which the infrastructural object (the railway or the bridge) assumes agency, the railway “demanding” to be built. This centripetal force of the assemblage (territorialization) overwhelms centrifugal agencies (deterritorialization) and convivial potentialities. The novels under consideration here arrive at different “points,” but infrastructure (the bridge, the railway) provides the centripetal acceleration for necropolitical vectors. In the novel The Bridge over the River Kwai, for example, the ideological framework of the narrative immediately recognizes the relativity of orientalist prejudice: “The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.”56 And yet, of course, the sides of this conflict—so-called Allied and Axis powers—invigorate their speech with racist diatribes about the stoicism of British or Japanese “character,” the sense of national purpose, and the existential crisis presented by the railway in question. “Saving face” was equally important to British and Japanese soldiers; the Japanese colonel, Saito, shared the same mentality, in that regard, as his British prisoner, Colonel Nicholson. Colonel Saito would have to commit ritual suicide if the railway were not constructed on schedule, and Colonel Nicholson and his men faced being worked to death—something they embrace, ironically, to prove British culture superior to its Japanese counterpart. Thus, the brutalities deployed by Japanese officers “were all as meaningless as the show of ponderous dignity which was Colonel Nicholson’s favourite weapon, wielded as a mark of British superiority.”57 British imperialism could provide no form of superiority for British soldiers, attracted as it was to the same murderous brutality being applied to the British POWs, and the British soldiers recognize that their Asian peers in Singapore “had proved to be not much more oppressive than any Western army of occupation would have been.”58 Behind the enslaved labor on the Death Railway was something Colonel Nicholson recognized as familiar to “East and West alike”: “racial pride, a mystic belief in authority, the dread of not being taken seriously, a strange sort of inferiority complex which gave him a jaundiced, suspicious outlook on life, as though he was in perpetual fear of being laughed at.”59 To the Japanese officers, the railway must be completed “to provide a way through to Bengal for the army which has liberated those two countries from European oppression. Japan needs this railway to continue her victorious advance, to enable her to overrun India and so bring this war to a rapid conclusion.”60 These socially constructed racist and authoritarian phantoms haunt oppressive structures around the world, accelerating the necropolitical tendencies of infrastructural assemblages. Boulle satirizes the British officers by making them prove British “superiority” by doing a stellar job of constructing the enemy’s bridge, which demonstrates the futility of national and ethnic pride. At the end of the novel, a train carrying dignitaries is derailed by Allied commandos, but the bridge remains intact, as an attempt by British commandos to destroy it fails; in the film version, the bridge is destroyed when Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, accidentally falls dead on a detonator set up by a Canadian lieutenant. Notions of pride and superiority literally implode with the bridge.
The construction of the bridge is managed by Major Hughes, a former director of a Malaysian mining company, and Captain Reeves, a public works engineer from India.61 Notably, the British expertise in infrastructure engineering derives from colonial contexts. Colonel Nicholson sees the gradual manifestation of the bridge as “a living symbol of the fierce struggles and countless experiments by which a nation gradually raises itself in the course of centuries to a state of civilization.”62 He is so completely immersed in the nationalist imaginary and its racist dreamworld that he cannot bring himself to destroy the bridge for the strategic wartime aims of the nation, a paradox that not only satirizes the illogical mechanisms of nationalism but also traces the perimeter of the void into which the infrastructural necropolitical valences disappear. In the latter part of the novel, narrative emphasis switches from Hughes and Reeves and the effort to build a proper bridge to the commando force responsible for destroying the bridge. Joyce, a member of this force who used to design bridges in his civilian life, eventually sits in position to carry out the sabotage of the bridge. He must remain in position for an extended period of time, during which he drifts in and out of sleep, experienceing the fever-dream of an engineer once compelled to build bridges now being told to destroy one. This moment of brisantic conversion might be read by contemporary audiences in terms of the necessary social transformation we must undergo, from the delusions of the myth of progress to the eleventh-hour intervention of sabotage and social fragmentation. Joyce dreams of the job he held, sitting under a lamp with his drawing paper before him. But this image has a new heading superimposed on it:
He tried in vain to decypher the letters. They were dotted all over his drawing-paper, until at last they fused together again, as sometimes happens at the end of a film on a cinema screen, to form a single word. It was the word DESTRUCTION, in heavy black letters written in shiny ink, which reflected the light of the projector-lamp and bewilderingly filled the whole screen, leaving no room for any other character.63
On his own as the mission unfolds, Joyce no longer finds comfort in the standard motivations for destroying the bridge: “Hatred of the Japanese, sense of duty—these were ludicrous irritants which could not be expressed in a sufficiently clear form. He thought of his superior officers, of his friends who were relying on him entirely and who were now waiting on the opposite bank. Even that thought was not sufficiently real. . . . Even the intoxication of success was now of no avail.”64 Exorcised of conventional inspiration, Joyce’s mind returns to his vision of the drawing paper:
It was last night’s vision: the sheet of drawing-paper under the projector-lamp; the countless designs for the girder on which the brown squares were superimposed and which were dwarfed by a heading endlessly repeated in huge shining letters: the word DESTRUCTION. . . . He felt that this alone was sufficiently consistent, sufficiently complete, sufficiently powerful to make him rise above the disgust and horror of his wretched carcase.65
The narrative trajectory of The Bridge over the River Kwai moves from the centripetal force of competing nationalisms, which draw soldiers and civilians into the necropolitical vortex of bridge and railway construction, to the individual psyche on the precipice of destruction, a personal and material unbecoming.
In The Bridge over the River Kwai, the bridge is not destroyed; the intense focus on the bridge and its attendant nationalist and racist vortices dissipates into an aftermath of placid objects and a flat ontology. As the attempt to destroy the bridge passes, its “shadow” fades, and it becomes “nothing but a lifeless, useless structure,”66 part of “the anonymous material universe. This universe of earth, monstrous vegetation, water and mosquito-infested swamp was not perceptibly affected by this human contribution.”67 The source of so much horror becomes just another thing in a hostile world, and the discourses that worked to death thousands of humans for the construction of a railway that would be closed in 1947 subside with the ebb of hostilities.
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North revives some of the events and themes of The Bridge over the River Kwai, but Flanagan’s novel pursues in greater detail Boulle’s assertion that East and West are more alike than nationalists prefer to admit. Flanagan’s novel definitely has more in common with Boulle’s novel than with Lean’s film. The stoicism of Colonel Nicholson in Lean’s film, for example, is quickly dismissed in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan introduces a British colonel named Rexroth early in the novel. Rexroth assures Dorrigo Evans, the Australian POW who becomes famous for surviving the Death Railway, “that their British espirit de corps would hold and their British spirit would not break and their British blood would bring them through it together.”68 Unlike the indelible cinematic characterization of British stoicism portrayed by Alec Guinness, Colonel Rexroth is presented as part of the absurd milieu of the Death Railway, a bootlicking fool who advises the slave laborers that “as members of the British Empire, as Englishmen, we must observe the order and discipline that is the very lifeblood of the Empire. We will suffer as Englishmen, we will triumph as Englishmen.”69 On the next page of the novel, Rexroth dies of dysentery and is buried “along with everyone else in the jungle.”70 Thereafter, the Australian Dorrigo Evans becomes the acting commander of the POWs.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North follows narrative contours similar to those found in The Bridge over the River Kwai: Flanagan’s novel traces the racist groupthink, military objectives, and sense of national destiny that enfold masses of men to build a railway through the jungle, the misery and unspeakable suffering that define this project, and the aftermath, when the railway becomes irrelevant and the dead are just more dirt underfoot. Dorrigo Evans sees Major Nakamura, the Japanese commander of the POW camp, as “the terrifying force that takes hold of individuals, groups, nations, and bends and warps them against their natures, against their judgements, and destroys all before it with a careless fatalism,”71 an apt description of the centripetal impetus of the railway as sociotechnical assemblage. One structural distinction in Flanagan’s novel is the use of shifting narrative time and the subsequent emphasis on the postwar years. Boulle gestures at the fleeting nature of the horror witnessed on the Death Railway, but Flanagan extends the arc of time so that readers get a better sense of how an infrastructure project (and war crime) do not necessarily endure in the way one expects; or rather, that infrastructure endures in multiple cultural and material sites and capacities, not singularly as an object. While the focus of the novel is the story of Dorrigo Evans, the survivor of the Death Railway who becomes celebrated as a war hero, “the subject of biographies, plays and documentaries,”72 The Narrow Road to the Deep North also depicts the postwar struggles of the Japanese officers, and in this way achieves a fuller representation of what Boulle called the “optical illusion” of the cultural gap between East and West.
At the heart of Dorrigo Evans’s experience of the Death Railway is the brutal beating death of his close friend Frank “Darky” Gardiner, whom Dorrigo later learns was his nephew. Dorrigo tries to intervene in the beating but ends up negotiating with a Japanese officer to sacrifice Darky in order to save other POWs with a gift of quinine. “He could not help Darky Gardiner. The railway demanded it,” Dorrigo reasons. “Nakamura understood that. Dorrigo Evans had to accept it. He too had a part in the railway. Nakamura had a part. Darky Gardiner had a part, and his part was to be brutally beaten, and all of them—each one in his own way—had to answer to the terrible drumming.”73 For slaves building this particular piece of infrastructure, there was no escape; Dorrigo’s (and hence the reader’s) perception of events telescopes potentiality into the confined space of fatalism, such is the momentum of this infrastructure assemblage. Dorrigo dismisses the murder of Darky Gardiner as a horrific necessity for the railway to exist.74 Major Nakamura, in between alcoholic benders and doses of Philopon (methamphetamine), says through his interpreter, Lieutenant Fukuhara, that “progress has no need of freedom,” also noting that the British Empire was built “sleeper by sleeper of non-freedom, bridge by bridge of non-freedom.”75 The two sides, masters and slaves, become prisoners of post factum justifications for war crimes in the name of the railway:
All that mattered was the railway. As naked slaves to their section of the Line, with nothing more than ropes and poles, hammers and bars, straw baskets and hoes, with their backs and legs and arms and hands, they began to clear the jungle for the Line and break the rock for the Line and move the dirt for the Line and carry the sleepers and the iron rails to build the Line. As naked slaves, they were starved and beaten and worked beyond exhaustion on the Line. And as naked slaves they began to die for the Line.76
Flanagan uses the refrain “the railway demanded it” to capture the apparent inevitability of necropolitical infrastructure in the context of colonialism, war, nationalism, and structural racism. The “demand” is not only an illustration of object agency; it is also an exhibition of how such agency becomes contiguous with authoritarian discourses and institutions: “Nakamura knew many would die trying to get there. Perhaps most. But the railway demanded it, the Emperor had ordered the railway, and this was the way it had been decided that the railway would be made.”77 Colonel Kota justifies the use of slave labor under deadly conditions to construct the railway because war is “beyond” ethical concerns and the Burma Railway is an “epoch-making construction” with which the Japanese will become “the new drivers of world progress.”78 The railway is therefore not simply a military objective but a conduit for cultural domination.
These novels about the Death Railway portray culture as inextricable from the infrastructural project, something often forgotten by scholars in infrastructure studies (which this book attempts to rectify). Flanagan foregrounds the railway as a cultural production. The Death Railway was “made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it.”79 In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the railway is figured by Japanese officers as the “embodiment” of the Emperor’s will80 and a channel for the global spread of Japanese culture. Colonel Kota describes the haibun “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” written by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, as a summation of “the genius of the Japanese spirit.”81 The poet and the railroad form an imperialist conjunction, in the minds of the Japanese officers:
They were deeply moved . . . knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit—that Japanese spirit that was soon to daily travel along their railway all the way to Burma, the Japanese spirit that from Burma would find its way to India, the Japanese spirit that would from there conquer the world. In this way, thought Nakamura, the Japanese spirit is not itself the railway, and the railway the Japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the wisdom of Basho to the larger world.82
On the Allied side, Dorrigo admires the poetry of Tennyson. Flanagan proposes an ambiguity in the progressive possibilities of literature: the veneration of acclaimed literature does not guarantee ethical behavior. In this case, great literature becomes an avatar of mass murder. But Japanese literature also functions in the novel as an imaginary counterpoint to the lethal materiality of the railway, which is often referred to as the Line. When the eighteenth-century poet Shisui died, he painted a circle. His death poem, or jisei, “rolled through Dorrigo Evans’ subconscious, a contained void, an endless mystery, lengthless breadth, the great wheel, eternal return: the circle—antithesis of the line.”83 The circle—the void of existence—contrasts with the many certainties associated with the Line: the omniscient will of the Emperor, the arrogance of nationalism, and the brute force of military administration. With the end of the war, the Line “began welcoming its own end.”84 The agency of the railway, for a brief time a tyrannical, necropolitical demand, quickly dissipates into vortices of unbecoming: “The Line welcomed weeds into the embankments the slaves had carried as dirt and rock in their tankas, it welcomed termites into the fallen bridge timbers the slaves had cut and carried and raised, it welcomed rust over the railway irons the slaves had shouldered in long rows, it welcomed rot and ruin.”85 The metaphors of line and circle eventually culminate in exposing the lie of the endurance of infrastructure, the promise that the politics of infrastructure are concretized for eternity, that these built structures transcend death: “For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained.”86 The railway and literature are part of a reciprocal exchange on the horrors of slavery, memory, empire, and the transience of life and infrastructure.
The first black-and-white image in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) captures the steam of a locomotive arriving at Kraków Główny railway station, which finished construction in 1847. The black-and-white footage obviously invokes newsreel footage, and the locomotive has become synecdoche for Holocaust horrors. “If there exists an Auschwitz code, enabling us to speak after and about the Holocaust,” writes Wojciech Tomasik, “railway images seem to constitute its core.”87 High-speed passenger trains built prior to the war provided the Nazi regime with a modernist sheen.88 When World War II started, the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DRB) became an essential logistical component of the Nazi war machine. According to a 2019 study by mathematical biologist Lewi Stone—who used railway transportation records to measure the intensity of the killing at the height of the Nazi Holocaust during Operation Reinhard, a period of 100 days in 1942—the “singularly violent character” of the Holocaust achieved its exceptional “kill rate” as “an outcome of having the key death camps operating simultaneously for a period, supported by the railway system to rapidly transport Jewish victims to the camps.”89 From August to October 1942, approximately 450,000 Jews were killed each month, a killing intensity 80 percent greater than that of the Rwandan genocide, a contemporary genocide often considered to have experienced the most intense period of killing. Without the participation of the DRB, argues Alfred C. Mierzejewski, the Holocaust would have been unachievable:
The Deutsche Reichsbahn was involved in the Nazi program of persecution of the Jews from beginning to end. Without the provision of transport by the Reichsbahn, the Holocaust would not have been possible. About half of the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis were brought to their deaths by the DRB. . . . The Reichsbahn cooperated fully with the Nazi regime to remove Jews from its own ranks. Prior to the outbreak of the war, it also participated in the program of intensifying discrimination against the Jews.90
The ghettos created by the Nazis were deliberately constructed near railway connections, and the concentration camps aligned with rail lines and concealment from the public.91 In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were transported to concentration camps, even more were moved to the eastern front and executed.92 Mierzejewski contends that Albert Ganzenmüller, the Undersecretary of State at the Reich Transport Ministry, indisputably “was fully aware of the Jewish special trains and their purpose.”93 For historian Christopher R. Browning, the evidence shows “railway men at all levels knew precisely with whom they were dealing and what they were doing.”94 One reason the DRB could almost effortlessly participate in the Holocaust was the minimal impact the death trains had on regular rail traffic, resulting in little attention being paid to the operation of the genocidal machinery.95
The history of the Holocaust at first overlooked the importance of the German railroads to the execution of genocide. In 1976, Raul Hilberg addressed this omission of what he called “an important clue to the nature of totalitarianism and the manner in which it may function.”96 Hilberg saw the railway system in general as “a major factor in the growth of modern authoritarian government,”97 but his essay was the first substantial intervention on the subject in Holocaust history. As others who followed him would assert, he situated the railroad “not on the fringe” of the Holocaust but “indispensable at its core.”98 The death trains carried the belongings of death camp victims to Germany for distribution in addition to transporting prisoners to the camps, and the trains were financed by expropriated Jewish property and the forced contributions of Jewish communities in Germany.99 Hilberg describes the railroads as occasional “consumers as well,” exploiting forced Jewish labor and claiming some of their stolen goods.100 The multifaceted system of death trains provided historians with “profound questions about the substance and ramifications of the entire Nazi Reich.”101
While the death camps were primary killing sites in the Holocaust, Simone Gigoliotti argues forcefully for a “hidden Holocaust” inside the transport trains themselves.102 Gigoliotti describes the death trains as “experiential breaks from the ghettos and camps”103 that deserve greater attention as locations of “spatial and somatic trauma.” The genocidal circuits of the death trains “are a grim testament to modern state-sponsored practices of isolation, exclusion, and ethnic cleansing.”104 In his novel The Death Train (1978), Christian Bernadac represents the journey of the death train 7909 from Compiègne to Dachau. Bernadac provides, through the dialogue of a prisoner, a vivid sense of the deadly conditions of the train car in which prisoners were drinking their own urine to survive, and only three out of 100 prisoners, in one particular journey, arrived alive:
“They closed us up in here to kill us off. They’re going to ride us around until we all croak. In Compiègne they packed one hundred of us into a single car. Here there are only three of us left alive, and in the other cattle cars, maybe they’re all cooked already. They did it on purpose. They wanted us to start fights. There’s no air in here. That’s on purpose too. I’m telling you: this train is the death train. Not one of us will get out of here alive. You see?”105
At the back of Bernadac’s book, he lists the names of the 536 dead and 1,630 survivors of the convoy of July 2, 1944, the subject of his novel. Throughout the novel, Bernadac also provides references to historical documents. The effect is akin to what Hayden White describes in his discussion of Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz, “to demonstrate to his readers the difference between a merely truthful account of an event, of the kind provided by most survivor-witnesses, and an artistic treatment of a real event in his past which transcends the truth-reality distinction.”106 Gigoliotti uses witness testimony to demonstrate that the “sensory invasions” of the death trains sometimes exceeded the “degradations of the camp world.”107 For Jewish victims, this form of “forced transit” possessed a particularly powerful form of material reverberation because of their collective history of diasporic conditions.108 Gigoliotti extends her conclusions about the deportation journeys of the Holocaust as ways to engage with other examples, historical and contemporary, “of the displacement of colonized, indigenous, and oppressed populations.”109
The rail lines of the Holocaust, integral to the Nazi genocide, compelled historians to debate for decades whether the Allies should have, or could have, bombed the concentration camps or the railways servicing them and thereby reduced the number of victims in the Nazi genocide. The general answer to this historical hypothetical, provided by historian Michael J. Neufeld, is a reminder that substantial necropolitical assemblages rarely can be undone by a single act of sabotage or attack:
As for railway bombing, it was entirely natural that the Slovakian underground wanted the Allies to cut the lines on which the death trains from Hungary were moving. However, this task would have been extremely difficult at the ranges involved. Tactical air power was not available in profusion, and the odds of heavy bombers cutting rail lines and knocking out bridges were very poor. Attacking a town with marshaling yards en route might have offered a slightly better chance. But rail lines and some bridges could have been repaired easily by German crews, and deportation trains diverted to other routes, as the Nazis did not care what happened to the individuals inside. Readers may make up their own minds, but I believe that at best the pace of deportation might have been slowed slightly if the Allies had attacked while the Hungarian trains were still moving; however, this was nearly impossible as the appeals did not even reach the top leadership in the West until about the time the Horthy government ordered a halt.110
While the tactics available to slow or stop the Holocaust remain specific to historical and ideological realities, such historical atrocities can offer lessons for contemporary mechanized death on a massive scale: the industrialized global slaughter of nonhuman animals; the diffuse horrors of anthropogenic climate change; the pervasive despair generated by biodiversity loss; the irreversible metamorphosis of life in the Anthropocene. At the very least, the historical counterfactuals surrounding the Holocaust might compel contemporary struggles to register the affective awareness of brisantic failures, the sadness and disgust produced by necropolitical machinery run amok. Another way of putting this: How can art mediate remembrance of genocidal infrastructure, in this case the death trains? Or, as Todd Presner poses the question in his analysis of W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, “How can the artificial, the fictional, the contingent, and the imaginative contribute to the extension of both memory and historical knowledge without in any way impugning survivors’ memories and historical truth?”111 In Austerlitz, the memory of the Holocaust mingles intimately with the architecture of the railway stations of Europe. The novel’s German narrator becomes friends with a Jewish man who was dispatched on the Kindertransport by his family before they were killed in the Holocaust. Sebald himself was born in May 1944, toward the end of the war, and his novel approaches memory and the Holocaust from the perspective of those who lived after the events of the Holocaust, whose memories of it are necessarily based on the ruins of history and not firsthand experience. Austerlitz is framed by railway stations: the novel begins in the Central Station of Antwerp and ends at the gare d’Austerlitz of Paris. Presner sees this use of the railway system as “the figure par excellence of the dialectic of German/Jewish modernity—its emancipating freedom and its coordinated destruction—but it is also the material condition of possibility for conceiving of this modernist practice of representation and thereby reimagining both memory and history.”112 The railway in Austerlitz becomes synecdoche for the Holocaust and for epistemology. For Sebald, language cannot match the eyewitness experience of mass destruction; but the work of fiction can provide an assemblage of historical remains—from photographs and letters to railway stations and bunkers—through which the author and readers can begin to recover memories of the event.113 The Jewish character in the novel, himself named Austerlitz, performs “the struggle to find traces of his past in the present.”114 Austerlitz has an “obsession with railway stations,” connected to his own experience of the Kindertransport and his parents’ tragic end in the concentration camp; the Paris stations are “places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune,” the modernist dialectic to which Presner refers.115 The railway stations embodied the imposition of industrial time, what Austerlitz calls “by far the most artificial of all our inventions,”116 but the railway lines that mark Austerlitz’s journey look like “muscles and sinews in an anatomical atlas”117 and yet also seem to run “away into infinity.”118 The contradictions of Austerlitz accumulate but always return to the railway and its formative reciprocity with the Holocaust:
I studied the maps of the Greater German Reich and its protectorates, which had never before been more than blank spaces in my otherwise well-developed sense of topography. I traced the railway lines running through them, felt blinded by the documentation recording the population policy of the National Socialists, by the evidence of their mania for order and purity, which was put into practice on a vast scale through measures partly improvised, partly devised with obsessive organizational zeal.119
Austerlitz does not offer a definitive epistemological declaration for art or history, but traces the refractory dynamic of art and infrastructure, the interactive semiomaterial processes resistant to becoming mere formalism or deterministic materialism. The death trains of the Holocaust—shot through with the Nazi “mania for order and purity” but partly “improvised”—reveal a topography of genocide that provides a conditional warning and not a programmatic premonition.
Simultaneous with the Holocaust, the Soviet Union operated a railway network within its Gulag system for political prisoners and others deemed criminal. The absence of cameras filming the horrors of the Soviet forced labor camps meant a paucity of historical and popular representation after they were exposed.120 During its peak years of operation, from 1929 until 1953, approximately 18 million people endured the Gulag system of the Soviet Union.121 The Gulag was an integral component of Soviet industrialization, providing labor for major infrastructure projects, but infrastructure such as roads had been built by prison labor and slaves in Russia since the eighteenth century.122 In her discussion of work on the Baltic-White Sea Canal, a major infrastructure project built by a prison labor force of over 175,000 and finished in 1933, Andrea Pitzer identifies the sociotechnical nexus of culture and infrastructure evident during its construction:
At times it seemed as if nearly as much energy was expended on glorifying the effort as on actually digging the canal. Daily contests were held between brigades to see who could excavate the most. There were artistic contests, too, with financial rewards for the best artistic production about the project. The winning play recounted the tale of an English journalist who comes to the worksite expecting to see horrific conditions, but instead is so inspired by what he finds that he decides to stay.123
As with so much state-sponsored art for or about infrastructure, the “artistic contests” in this camp produced outrageous erasure of the infrastructure’s necropolitical reality. In an instance of unintentional self-criticism, US vice president Henry Wallace visited the Kolyma region in the Russian Far East in May 1944 to see the largest and deadliest Soviet concentration camp in Magadan and compared it with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the worst elements of the camp concealed from his inspection. An estimated one million prisoners worked in Kolyma, with no accurate count of the dead available to historians.124
Of the artistic portraits of Gulag life that exist, of course Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (written between 1958 and 1968) is surely the most famous. The Gulag Archipelago somewhat resembles Austerlitz, in that the composition is a mixture of reportage, historical documentation, and literary imagination. Solzhenitsyn describes the “zak cars,” or prisoner railroad cars, that travel from port to port of the Gulag Archipelago.125 The “tormented hearts” of the zak cars travel “the same snaky rails, behind the same smoke, past the same fields, posts, and haystacks as you, and even a few seconds sooner than you.”126 The “obsessive organizational zeal” of the Nazis appears in the Gulag railroad, which runs on a schedule and reproduces “the familiar life of the train, which is always exactly the same” in most of the cars.127 The death trains of the Gulag, like those of the Holocaust, developed in part by improvisation based on historical contingencies, which Solzhenitsyn describes with reference to the 1888 painting by Nikolai Yaroshenko, Life Is Everywhere:
As far back as 1896, Lenin traveled to Siberian exile in an ordinary third-class passenger car (with free people all around him) and shouted to the train crew that it was intolerably crowded. The painting by Yaroshenko which everyone knows, Life Is Everywhere, shows a fourth-class passenger car re-equipped in very naïve fashion for prisoner transport. . . . However, it really became the favorite means of prisoner transport only in the twenties; and it became the universal and exclusive means only from 1930 on, when everything in our life became uniform. Therefore it would be more correct to call it a Stalin car rather than a Stolypin car.128
Yaroshenko’s painting exhibits compassion for the prisoners being exiled to Siberia. A young child in the painting drops bread crumbs for a small group of pigeons at the train station, and the rest of what is presumably her family and other prisoners look on. The painting, like many survivors’ memoirs, reminds us that even in the most despairing situations involving systemic torture and death there can be remnants of resilience, though irrepressible defiance does not necessarily take the form of organized, sustained resistance. Solzhenitsyn compares the inside of a zak car to a menagerie, except that the human menagerie—“huddled there in cages, the floors and bunks surrounded on all sides by metal grilles, looking out at you pitifully, begging for something to eat and drink”—is more crowded than its nonhuman counterpart.129 Despite the inhumane conditions of the zak cars, Solzhenitsyn notes sardonically, “A sentenced prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be tortured? They need him for construction work.”130 The infrastructure assemblages of the Soviet Union, and of so many other nation-states throughout history, have depended on slave labor for their modernist monuments. In the case of the Soviet Union, the Gulag of Stalinist modernization betrayed the socialist revolution (already betrayed by Lenin) in a manner that produced vestigial political economies, architectures, and ecological damage from brisantic failure. Like the death trains of the Holocaust, the trains of the Gulag system provide historical referents for assessing brisantic strategies against contemporary and future death train assemblages.
Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and Yeon Sang-Ho’s Train to Busan (2016) are death train narratives that depict revolutionary themes from opposite ends of the revolution: Snowpiercer tracks the violent upheaval of a proletarian mob assigned to the impoverished end of a train circling the globe after a cataclysmic event has plunged the planet into a perpetual freeze; and Train to Busan imagines a zombie plague from the perspective of mostly bourgeois train passengers who first believe the societal disruption is being caused by a general strike. Both films work within the parameters of their respective genres—postapocalyptic and zombie horror—to represent the possibilities and constraints of revolutionary praxis within the paralytic environs of infrastructural brutalism, and both films confine most of the action to a train with a fatalistic destination. In the case of Snowpiercer, the train must stay on track for a continuous journey, else the passengers risk the inhospitable climate of a world transformed by geoengineering run amok; for the passengers in Train to Busan, their destination, Busan, has been overrun by the zombie hordes, and the humans on the train are being overwhelmed by the spread of the zombie virus. In both films, the existential crisis that envelops the train combines with a class struggle on board. The films’ revolutionary imaginary presents railway infrastructure as a delimiting materiality instead of an inherently liberatory one, and class struggle as occurring within the infrastructural limitations, not external to them. In other words, the revolutions in these films portray railway infrastructure as something to be overcome rather than an inherently progressive element of antiauthoritarian struggles. Unlike much contemporary theorizing of technology, for example, which often proposes technological affordances more politically flexible than they typically are, Snowpiercer and Train to Busan consider modern infrastructure as a prominent barrier for the existential crises of anticapitalist struggles.
In the film version of Snowpiercer, a geoengineering attempt to curb global warming backfires and produces a frozen planet. In the graphic novels on which the film is based (a series of four volumes in French begun in 1982, later translated into three volumes in English), the origin of the natural catastrophe that covers the world in ice remains ambiguous. The difference is significant and part of what signals the film’s more pessimistic attitude toward the liberatory potential of technology. Another important difference between the graphic novel and its adaption is the origin of the Snowpiercer train: in the graphic novel, we are told the train “was a pleasure train before the catastrophe,” designed “to be fully self-sufficient, without scheduled stops or resupply, for weeks at a time,” features that “probably” saved the lives of those on board.131 In the film, the train exists in anticipation of the catastrophe, or at least as a precautionary measure in case of a catastrophe. Rather than a bourgeois entertainment that accidentally becomes the ark for survivors of the apocalypse (as in the graphic novel), the train becomes the creation of a singular engineer, Wilford, who responds technocratically to impending extinction. The train is more specifically born of technofuturistic survivalism, like an expensive bunker curated by a Silicon Valley CEO in New Zealand.132 This choice also aligns the film against technocracy and the social class it serves.
In the graphic novels, the passengers gradually learn of additional Snowpiercers circling the globe; in the second volume, it is revealed that the Snowpiercer at the center of the narrative has collided with another Snowpiercer.133 Fear of another collision, more than of the climate outside the train, becomes the central existential crisis for the passengers: “Since then, they’ve used people’s fear of a head-on collision to control them. . . . They believe that without that fear, all those poor fools in the tail would have killed themselves long ago.”134 By the third volume, the new reality incorporates ten Snowpiercers, three of which are missing, seven of which have ended their journey in a settlement of sorts beneath a nuclear reactor.135 A group of survivors decides to leave the settlement because radiation from the plant is poisoning everything. Once again, the sociotechnical assemblage that sustains human life is also destroying it: “If you follow us, I won’t promise anything,” declares an exile. “But what’s keeping you alive is also killing you. You depend on a power source that is devouring you and devouring your children. The plant will be your death.”136 In the central dynamic of the Snowpiercer stories, from graphic novel to film, technosocial fatalism is portrayed as the force that prevents a revolutionary break: Leave the train, and you die; if the train stays on this track, it will hit another train and all will die; stay in the compound beneath the nuclear reactor, and everyone will eventually die from radiation poisoning.
Gerry Canavan describes Snowpiercer as an instance of “necrofuturism,” the “endlessly rehearsed landscape of death and disaster that dominates contemporary visions of the coming decades.”137 For Canavan, necrofuturism produces a fatalistic vision of “a coming disaster we can anticipate but not prevent.”138 While acknowledging the “radical constructedness” of the capitalist market system and its outcomes, necrofuturism nonetheless commits the subjugated to a belief in the inevitability of their apocalypse.139 In the anticapitalist allegory in Snowpiercer, the death train provides passengers with what is presumably their only form of survival; simultaneously, the train is a by-product of the capitalist order that killed the world, and within the train the surplus population relegated to the abject conditions of the rear car are ensured premature death, their only value to the Snowpiercer being their production of children capable of replacing an essential component of the engine that has since gone extinct. The allegory of the death train in Snowpiercer encompasses all of industrialized society and “names our deflationary belief that the conditions of exploitation and extraction that make contemporary society ‘function’ are foundationally unsustainable and thus manifestly have no future, and yet despite this fact they will simply not be altered in any way, even if it kills us all.”140 Canavan suggests that the graphic novel version of Snowpiercer exposes the constructed, historical nature of capitalism, and thereby makes evident the possibility that we could change course: “The comic makes us recognize the necrofuture is not an immutable law of the universe to which we are hopelessly doomed. It is instead the terrible future that the people in power have planned for us, and are at every moment deliberately bringing into existence—which means, by the same token, it is a future we might yet choose against, a freight train with a head of steam but one that we can yet derail.”141 Canavan’s interpretation of Snowpiercer is largely correct, but his opposition of fatalism to boundless choice does not adequately describe the situation in which the oppressed find themselves. Some aspects of the attenuated disaster in progress cannot be reversed. Some qualities of the unprecedented destruction caused by humans can only be slowed; a soft landing might be possible instead of a crash. There will be a measure of sea level rise in the coming decades. There will be a certain amount of global warming, given the greenhouse gas emissions that have already happened. In addition to some inevitable environmental collapse, the forms of retrofitting and salvaging available to us are not infinite; the sociotechnical assemblages that made possible this world of concrete, steel, and steam also defined many of the constraints for possible futures. While Snowpiercer exposes the illusion of capitalist realism, it does not offer much in the way of remedies to this dire situation. However, it does perhaps offer the most important tactic for a departure from capitalist suicide: the train must be derailed.
Canavan does not read Snowpiercer with the same sense of realism that I am applying here. For him, the entire story is so absurd that one should not derive actual tactics from it: “Snowpiercer, it seems to me, is plainly about this effort of the imagination; neither the setup nor the climax is really amenable to any sort of realistic analysis about the practicalities of the situation. The whole thing is genuinely preposterous from start to finish. The point of the film is not to work out the inner logic of some possible future but rather to disrupt our guilty comfort and our comforting guilt about the actually-existing system we all know is terrible but think we cannot oppose, only wring our hands about and be more beautiful than.”142 But this interpretation denies Snowpiercer its articulation of the infrastructural brutalism that dominates the real world. If Snowpiercer were “genuinely preposterous” and so abstracted from actual material conditions that it could only operate as an intellectual exercise for allaying the guilt experienced by some, then it could not work effectively as a political allegory; but it does so, and the reason it does is because its depiction of class struggle within a technofuture produced by capitalist logics resonates so comprehensively with actually existing capitalism. Even if most people cannot imagine a future outside of capitalism, that lack of imagination no longer constitutes the urgent necessity of contemporary radicalism; the real challenge, given the advance of ecological collapse, is for a militant minority to cause enough destruction that ecocide is delayed and time for creating some kind of transitional economy is created. First, derail the train; then figure out life after capitalism. In this respect, Snowpiercer depicts applicable praxis.
Marx called revolutions the “locomotives of history,” a humanist metaphor that diminishes too much the agency of nonhuman animals and objects. Benjamin’s interpretation of the metaphor seems more appropriate for the contemporary condition: the revolution will be the passengers pulling the emergency brake, a still-too-humanist image but one that recognizes “the train” as something that must be part of a Great Deceleration and not something that should be commandeered intact. “All past revolutions failed because they couldn’t take the engine,” Curtis says with confidence at the beginning of Snowpiercer the film. Many analysts frame the structure of the train as an obvious allusion to a society stratified by class, and the revolt led by Curtis as a Marxist attempt at seizing the means of production (in this case, the engine that invigorates the means of production on board). If the engine functions in this allegory as a surrogate for the state—and given the indoctrination process we witness involving children pledging their allegiance to Wilford and the engine, this analogy seems accurate—then the revolutionary lesson of Snowpiercer is more anarchist than Marxist. To “take the engine” might be read as synonymous with “seizing the state,” which makes Curtis more of a Marxist; he also tells his comrades, “We’ll be different when we get there [the engine].” Thus, Curtis believes that a revolution should involve seizing state power, and he does not think possession of state power will alter the intentions of the revolutionaries, who will behave unlike their existing authoritarian leaders. This sounds like generations of Marxists, and Snowpiercer reveals the error of Curtis’s strategy in the final act of the film. Not only was the revolt actually supported by Wilford and his accomplice Gilliam, but seizing the engine was revealed as a horrendous miscalculation that Namgoong Minsu, the security specialist, and his daughter Yona correct by setting off an explosion using toxic waste that doubles as a synthetic drug, Kronole. The explosion causes an avalanche that derails the train. The only visible survivors are the youngsters Yona and Timmy, and they are confronted by a polar bear outside the wreckage of the train. The ending of the film is more ambiguous than that of the comic, but one thing about the film is certain and affirmed by the ending: Curtis was delusional in his pursuit of the engine, and the film is clearly advocating a risky future outside the train instead of replicating the authoritarian technosocial order inside the train. This refusal of the Marxist strategy of seizing state power—which historically has repeatedly ended in totalitarianism and mass murder, in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia—would seem to put the film’s ideological trajectory more in line with anarchist conceptions of revolution. Anarchists, of course, disagreed with Marxists over the principle of seizing state power in a revolutionary situation. Bakunin famously declared, “the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick,’” an admonition of the inherently abusive quality of state power.143 Not all anarchists are opponents of industrialization, of course, but the anarchist vision of revolution has always been opposed to the Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Train to Busan works within a similar milieu—the confined quarters of a train—but here the existential crisis outside the train is a viral zombie invasion. Instead of portraying the passenger revolt primarily from the perspective of the proletariat, as in Snowpiercer, Train to Busan witnesses events from the perspective of Seok-Woo, a divorced fund manager, and his daughter Soo-an, who are on a train to see her mother. When news of the social chaos breaks, Seok-Woo speaks with his office assistant for details. His first assumption is that the chaos is part of a strike. TV news reports that the chaos is nationwide. “I don’t know what’s happening,” says the assistant over the phone. “But it’s not a simple strike.” When it is revealed that a company being financed by Seok-Woo’s operation, YS Biotech, is the source of the virus, Seok-Woo asks, “Is this my fault?” Unlike most zombie apocalypse films, Train to Busan does not reward the most selfish characters; in fact, greed and selfishness are punished, and altruistic behavior is often rewarded. The class divisions inside the train are explicit: the real villain of the film is the COO of a company called Stallion Express, Yon-suk, who repeatedly puts others at risk to increase his chance of survival. By contrast, Seok-Woo undergoes a transformation from work-addicted capitalist who ignores his daughter to selfless hero who sacrifices himself—only after he has been infected by the virus, notably—to save his daughter. In this transformation, Seok-Woo befriends Sang-hwa, a burly man with a pregnant wife, Seong-kyeong. When Soo-an tells Sang-hwa that her father is a fund manager, Sang-hwa turns to his wife and declares, “He leeches off others.” Soo-an castigates those who exhibit selfish behavior, and she is aware of her father’s flaws: “You only care about yourself,” she tells him. Similarly, Seok-Woo, Sang-hwa, and other passengers collaborate with a homeless man who sneaks aboard the train in their attempt to survive the zombie attack. Whereas Snowpiercer focuses on the revolt of the proletariat from the back of the train, Train to Busan emphasizes the redemption of a capitalist in the context of societal collapse. This redemption is a form of what Amilcar Cabral called “class suicide,” at least in a very narrow sense, because Seok-Woo aligns himself with those who are outside and against his socioeconomic class (primarily with a wrestler, Sang-hwa, and a nameless homeless man). This might be too generous a reading, of course, because Seok-Woo only sacrifices his class interests, and later his life, under extraordinary circumstances, and his redemption is framed predominantly as a transformation of his relationship with his daughter.
Both Snowpiercer and Train to Busan feature popular revolts in the confines of a train and the striation of railway tracks. Both films situate infrastructure in (post-)apocalyptic conditions, and as the principal arbiter of revolutionary possibilities. In Snowpiercer, the passengers manage to derail the train. In Train to Busan, the passengers first attempt to deboard the train at Daejeon; when they discover the station has been overrun by zombies, they retreat to the train. The track is blocked at East Daegu station, so the passengers must leave the train and search for new transportation. The conductor starts a train on a different track, before he is eaten; and this runaway train, essentially, becomes the milieu in which the final confrontation between Seok-Woo, Soo-an, and Seong-kyeong and the corporate tyrant Yon-suk takes place. There exists a certain parallel, therefore, between Snowpiercer and Train to Busan and the ways in which these films conclude by isolating their heroes with the engine of a train (the Snowpiercer is of course not out of control in the same sense as the train heading for Busan, but in both cases the trains have nowhere to go but where the singular track will take them). In both films, the individuals assumed to be the heroes are undermined: Curtis discovers the revolution he led is a fraud, and he learns the truth about the exploitation of children necessary for the engine to continue; and Seok-Woo becomes infected by the zombie virus, so his redemption can no longer end by his being reunited with the young daughter he ignored in favor of his work. Both Curtis and Seok-Woo die in the final act, but their sacrifice allows others to survive. The agency of these patriarchal figures realizes its greatest libertory potential in what is essentially self-destruction. While Curtis occupies Wilford and the engine car, Namgoong Minsu and Yona manage to apply the Kronole to the door that leads outside. The subsequent explosion derails the train. Seok-Woo defeats Yon-suk in a struggle for the engine, then jumps off the train as he turns into a zombie and relives memories of time spent with his daughter. As a result, Soo-an and Seong-kyeong survive the trip to Busan, where they encounter soldiers guarding the perimeter of the station. The survivors in these films mirror the self-sacrifice of the patriarchs: in Snowpiercer, Namgoong Minsu’s teenage daughter Yona and the young African child Timmy survive the crash, wander into the frigid wasteland dressed in garb that identify them as Inuit, and encounter a lone polar bear, perhaps a sign that life can exist outside the train. In other words, from the death of the white, patriarchal, technophilic order arises a new form of postapocalyptic Indigeneity. In Train to Busan, both of the central capitalist characters, Seok-Woo and Yon-suk, die, and two women, one pregnant, survive. The implications of the conclusion to Train to Busan are less dramatic than the stark ending of Snowpiercer, but the symbolism suggests the possibility of an emerging postcapitalist, postpatriarchal order; or, to read the ending in a less extravagant manner, one could posit the survival of Soo-an and Seong-kyeong simply as an affirmation of matriarchal and anticapitalist politics. The radical politics imagined briefly by these two films, in the context of infrastructural brutalism, conjoins the existing technosocial order with capitalism and patriarchy, at the very least, and portrays the end of the line as the last stop for a specific assemblage of necropolitical valences that have been riding the rails for over a century and a half.
The contemporary death train in the real world is el tren de la muerte, the network of trains that traverse Mexico on the way to the United States, and upon which migrants ride to escape various violent oppressions further south. As many as half a million migrants ride on top of these death trains every year, from Central America to the United States, through a gamut of threats that range from accidental injury to extortion, gang rape, and death. Represented in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2009 film Sin Nombre, the 20-day journey through Mexico with little food or water on the freight trains known as La Bestia—“cargo trains transporting a variety of products to the United States, including food, automobiles, transportation equipment, cement, chemicals, and plastics”144—carries vulnerable populations fleeing violence and political persecution to the United States, where they must face the violence and persecution of border authorities. In 2014, the Mexican government increased patrols to make it more difficult to board the trains, and the trains were ordered to increase their speeds, but migrants continue to risk their lives on them. Much of the precarity migrants are fleeing was created by interventions of the US government, IMF, and World Bank over the past century, on behalf of multinational corporations in Central America and the brutal regimes that facilitate corporate power.145 The story of the death trains, real and fictional, traces the necropolitical formations of global capitalism from the foundational violence of dispossession and enslavement in the construction of colonial railways, to the industrialization of mass murder and genocide during the Holocaust, to the precarity of Central American migrants fleeing conditions created by global capitalism. As accelerated capital accumulation threatens the existence of most life on earth, the metaphor of the “runaway train” seems an appropriate description for the global capitalist order and its necropolitical commitments.