Leaving and Curating Traces in the Ruins of “Progress”

Thinking through industrial capitalist ruins and ruination, I am reminded of the significance of infrastructural temporalities. Geoffrey Bowker reminds us that, like the difference in temporalities between shaggy dogs and humans, infrastructures inhabit distinct life-cycles. As Tsing (2015) frequently gestures, considering, through "arts of noticing" how “a gathering becomes a happening” (i.e. to look beyond things as merely complex gatherings (Latour 2004), and to consider collaborative, mutualistic, and symbiotic gatherings toward collective survival) depends upon our ability to allow ourselves to be untethered from linear notions of time. Some might argue that, while physical bodies die through familiar rhythms (though I would tend to agree with Tsing that our future is increasingly, albeit unevenly precarious), our digital extensions of ourselves live on, practically in perpetuity ("What happens to your Facebook account when you die?"). I once met a student of critical digital humanities who was studying the anxieties surrounding “digital immortality” within the context of governmentality – maintaining that, the “arts of governance” and modulation of biopower extend even into death (Foucault 2010), and therefore into the non/death of our data. This is, in many ways no different from the old photographs that surface bittersweet memories of loved ones now gone, or the voicemails we can’t bear to delete, even at the insistence of friends and loved ones. If, as Walter Benjamin¹ states, “to live means to leave traces”, I imagine him also insisting that to live is to curate those traces left behind (within which – thinking with Tsing’s musing on gifts - value is in conversation with, but in these cases in excess of the sum of materiality as imprints on photographic film and digital strings of zeroes and ones that code for the voice and/or visage of loved ones now gone).

Thinking with Matsutake Worlds, how do we curate (i.e. care for) our toxic traces? As we’ve already discussed, infrastructures can be terrifyingly sublime (Larkin 2008), ghostly (Tsing 2015), haunting, and uncanny (Freud 2004) things. At the same time that they’re remembered through their mediation of the conditions of familiarity through calculative modes of concealment, their “death” disavows their promise of solidity, and by extension, the promise of modernity. Consider the massive spent radioactive fuel repository in Onkalo Finland, a dendritic network of underground tunnels extending several kilometers into the bedrock and slated to begin operating in 2020. If the project proves successfully scalable, it will be the longest-lasting structure ever built by humans. As the half-life of the radioactive materials it will contain is in excess of 100,000 years, the tomb will need to remain sealed for at least that long. Michael Madsen’s 2010 documentary Into Eternity documents the initial construction process. While staggering in scale (large Earth-moving equipment carve gigantic chunks of bedrock deep underground), Madsen’s focus is primarily on the linguistic indeterminacy of the project (calling attention to the tensions around semiotic as well as material scalability (Tsing 2015)). It is helpful to remember that, as Tsing notes, assemblages, rather than networks, are highly indeterminate things. In infrastructures engineered to contain ruination into such an inconceivably distant future, how do you irrefutably signify and translate danger and toxicity to future humans and/or post-humans? Similarly, the film articulates the speculative potential for derivatives of radioactive fuel to someday emerge as highly valued raw materials, intimating fears that the materials might be exposed through salvage accumulation (Tsing 2015).

           

Tsing also reminds us that even in the midst of late-industrial infrastructural ruins and deathscapes, one may encounter sites of contaminated diversity: inter-relational and indeterminate assemblages of collaborative survival. The Marin Headlands, just North of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge, is now managed by the National Park Service. Nestled within the bay, the place is stunning. Before it was a national park, the Headlands was infrastructurally configured into the technopolitics of “defense” (Hecht et al. 2011). All throughout the site, batteries, bunkers and an SF-88 Nike Missile silo all pointed toward the horizon of the Pacific Ocean, have now been overtaken by dense and lush green foliage. Writer and Bay Area historian Rebecca Solnit notes, “These welts of concrete have shifted, cracked, crumbled, and in some cases slid down eroded hillsides into the surf, but the majority of them are still in place. If you imagine them as an assault on the earth, then the earth has fought back, with foliage that has half-hidden and choked some of them, with the forces of water and temperature that drove cracks in the massive structures, with erosion that has dislodged and tilted some at crazy angles. But they have a harsh beauty of their own.” Solnit demonstrates this “harsh beauty” with Alex Fradkin’s photography, and closes with the haunting assertion that I think parallels the insurmountable ecological destruction wrought through industrial capitalism “We should pause amid the myriad pleasures that this Mediterranean climate and protected landscape afford to contemplate the presence of death and our own implication in the business. Until something profound changes in the United States, war will never be far away, and even on the most paradisiacal meander we do well to stop to remember this.”   

 

Images pulled as screen captures from http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2011/06/concrete-in-paradise/

References

Bowker, Geoffrey C. 2016. “Temporality — Cultural Anthropology.” Accessed March 8.     http://culanth.org/fieldsights/723-temporality.

Foucault M. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador

Freud, S. 2004. “The ‘uncanny.’” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, 74–101.

Hecht, G., ed. 2011. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Latour, B. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48.

Larkin, B. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rendell, J., B. Penner, and I. Borden, eds. 2000. Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Architext Series. London; New York: E & FN Spon.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2011. “Concrete in Paradise | Boom: A Journal of California.” Summer 2011, Vol. 1 No. 2. http://www.boomcalifornia.com/2011/06/concrete-in-paradise/.

Notes

11.)   I was unable to find the source for Benjamin’s quote, though it is cited in Rendell et al. (2000:314), who state that his reference to the leaving of traces concerns the configuration of “the interior”.