Papers by Jerome Whitington
Against Catastrophe, 2024
From the perspective of living river ecologies, a hydropower installation is an environmental dis... more From the perspective of living river ecologies, a hydropower installation is an environmental disaster. Like all disasters, it unfolds along intersecting temporalities whose resonances and dissonances amplify across each other, and lull and crescendo in waves. Time is a function of the material relations at hand. Many lives are put on hold or nullified in the anticipation of a large dam, long before it is built. Military logging companies move through the reservoir-to-be; poachers rouse the fugitives and displaced from the bush. Land speculators line up along arterials and access routes. Conservation biologists and perhaps some activists poke around, asking questions. People living in the vicinity of the site come to inhabit a purgatorial time inside-outside the formal structure of the project. As ‘affected persons,’ their possessions are cataloged by well-meaning social scientists; their means of provisioning and affective ecologies are carefully misrecognized within the categories of environmental management. They wait, unable to plan for their lives or carry on about the business of living. Their dreams are replaced by apprehension, and promises that are difficult to evaluate. Uncertainty about how to live will become a basic condition of existence. Their aspirations are codified in enforced-consensual participatory planning for the disaster to come.
The first part of this essay traces the powers of a dammed river through the dreams of engineers, through the primacy of volume and the maximum asymmetry created by hydropower infrastructure. Adopting the perspective of a living river, it follows the course of the water through the erosion of the riparian environment and the erosion of the livelihoods of people who depend on the river. The second part of the essay takes up the experience of harm in the context of social abandonment by laying out one version of planetarity today. Hydropower as a planetary condition offers one way to examine our very powerful, very rapidly transforming earth, as when knowledge about how to live or how to exist fails in the face of a planet that has become increasingly unrecognizable.
I.
Rivers are powerful, energetic. One of their powers is to provoke a fantastical imagination, a dreamworld of their magnificence betwixt the gravitational pull of the earth and the massiveness of the planet’s charged, sun-driven hydrology. How does one fantasize the power of the river? In dreams, the river is harnessed. The river expresses the barely constrained powers of the horse, muscled instrument of war and paradigm of conquest. The curved face of the concrete dam, sixty-five meters high and nearly half a kilometer long, restrains more than two billion cubic meters of water, or two billion tons of potential energy. Although every dam is unique, this could be any dam for each is specific yet generalizable. This one bridges a tributary of the Mekong in central Laos, wedged between Thailand and Vietnam. The rippling skin of the reservoir calmly expresses tremendous lines of force that delicately balance each other. The dam presents a power that need not raise its voice, a presence consolidated by the mere fact of its existence. “The imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact.” (Haraway, 1997). A catastrophe is held in engineered abeyance.
The fantasy involves a maximum possible asymmetry, an ontological cut in the riparian ecology. The asymmetry is expressed in numbers, which characterize something like a technological sublime, forever impressed by its own feats of accomplishment. Four hundred sixty megawatts of electricity, 220 cubic meters per second of water flow, 18 percent rate of return. (Power is always an asymmetry.) The numbers roll around uneasily in the mouths of critical social scientists, like marbles, begging for some more familiar scale of the human. For the dam in question, the engineered structures suture together two adjacent rivers: the water is tunneled five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge, where it drops 230 meters in elevation to gain the maximum head pressure the topography will allow. Volume x Pressure = Power. The cut is ontological because it recognizes the river in one specific way that excludes or reconfigures other possibilities for the river’s existence. Although it takes time, all other variables, all other life relations rework themselves around this minimal relation forged between gravity and hydrology. The engineers are the first to conform to the exigencies of the calculations. (They have been doing it their whole lives, learning to stoop and bow to the numbers.)
Confronted with incredulity or whispered accusations of hubris, engineers roll back on their heels and laugh in their bright confidence. Christine Folch (2016) observes that these huge numbers “can be difficult to envision because of their sheer scale, but they are necessary for understanding how sovereignty and nature are tied up in the energy from the dam.” The question concerns the legal status of the state’s claim over nature, before it is distributed as property or rights to its use are leased under contract. The volume of water held by the dam represents a calculated compromise between the engineers’ dream of what is possible, the shape of the earth, and the statistical mass of rainfall in the catchment above. The engineers are confident because only they bring together the sovereignty of capital with the sovereignty of the nation state. The dam’s design is the engineer’s offering to the sovereign claim to the dominion of the earth, bequeathed to investors with the words “concession” and “royalties.”
Émosson dam in Switzerland
[Figure]. The author plays atop maximum asymmetry at the Émosson dam in Switzerland, 2023. To place one’s body near the dam is to exist adjacent to the immensity of its power, and to the powers that built and own it. It is hard not to feel impressed, and cowed, even for people whose lives have been irrevocably cut by its presence. The international border between France and Switzerland was moved slightly to accommodate the jointly developed, binational project. To maintain parity between the countries, the Émosson dam is located wholly in Switzerland while the power generation facilities are wholly in France. I am grateful to Nant de Drance SA and to Mark Goodale and the energy transitions workshop at the University of Lausanne for the tour of this facility. Photo courtesy of Zeynep Oguz.
Four tunnels carry the water from the reservoir to a much smaller, adjacent river, about five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge. Enclosed by 28-centimeter-thick concrete walls and spanning seven meters in diameter, the tunnels are capable of withstanding a water hammer event, which is an unexpected shock wave capable of rupturing the engineering works. Imagine water filling a tube five kilometers long, seven meters across, moving at roughly a steady walking pace—imagine it slamming to a halt, surging. Something like 200,000 tons? (A back of the envelope calculation.) That is a water hammer event. The numbers index what Henrietta Moore (1994) has called a “passion for difference” in which volume is the priority of an ontological program that overrules every other aspiration.
volume-retention-flow, water-electricity-capital, from one current to the next
difference. above/below, potential/kinetic, Laos/Thailand, investment/return
Before/after. The construction of the dam is also a cut in time. The dam itself is an ecological event. To be sure, anticipation of the dam is a reminder that the event of the dam does not begin absolutely with the concrete structure, nor is the closure of its gates its culmination. All catastrophe is process, ongoing in slowness and fastness. All catastrophe provokes an opening, an unanswerable question of what has happened to us, which is not an experience that can be relegated to the past.
One fastness is the inevitability of erosion. The water released through the power turbines flows into a narrow channel, the Nam Hai, before it makes its way to the Hinboun river and then to the Mekong. The Nam Hai services a modest catchment. In its geological existence, the Nam Hai has never been asked to carry more water than this catchment could afford. Certainly, major floods occur whenever a tropical storm from the South China Sea breaks over the Annamite range. These floods had the historical effect of sculpting the riparian plains, depositing fresh layers of sediment, and flushing out deep pools, riffles and rapids.
With the ongoing operations of the dam, thousands of tons of sediment now travel downstream in waves along the riverbed. The rapids—essential breeding grounds—have become smothered in sand. Gravel has filled the deep pools that were once fishing waters covetously guarded by villagers against opportunistic outsiders. The channel has become much wider and shallower in a process that will take decades if not longer to stabilize. The banks are undercut by the current and the river eats the adjacent paddy. The difference between land and water has become unstable. Wet/dry is not an asymmetry, when the soil is in the water and the water flows across the land, a shimmering indifference across time. In slowness and fastness, the river reconfigures itself around the demands of its new infrastructural duties. In doing so, it also changes something of the nature of its existence. The river has become a drainage.
The erosion is a function of a specific, new resonance. The dam produces electricity tethered to economic demand across the Mekong in Thailand.
All the electricity from this powerhouse is not for Lao people. These 460 megawatts are reserved for northeast Thailand’s provincial capitalism, where demand ebbs and flows according to its own temporality. As the towns and villages awaken, the turbines rise to meet their day in a predictable pattern. Demand peaks in the afternoons and evenings, varying along with the strengt...
Environmental Humanities, 2023
This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic th... more This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. In the early decades of the century, multiple lines of evidence concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. Geological humanism refers to the way that themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with the collapse of Enlightenment aesthetics of symmetry, purpose, and order in the late eighteenth century. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Coal played a particular role in mediating between earth and atmosphere, mineral and life, and matter and energy. This article details several of these secular consolations offered to popular audiences by prominent climate scientists to show that the earth was far from being understood as a stable domain of nature that could be taken for granted.
Environmental Humanities, 2023
What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special sec... more What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth's powers are constitutive of contemporary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter's understanding of being human as a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly conditions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices participate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples. Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Finally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply unequal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing categories, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today's violent, creative, and liberatory planetary practices.
American Anthropologist
Carbon markets are the primary regulatory device for confronting climate change. This article ana... more Carbon markets are the primary regulatory device for confronting climate change. This article analyzes the data practices through which carbon markets connect local reductions in carbon emissions with the planetary atmosphere as such. Carbon markets and related accounting practices are a special form of what Kim Fortun calls "informating environmentalism," that is, the rendering of environmental issues into problems that can be managed by information systems. I explore the manufacture of carbon offsets (a kind of financial product) through two companies in Thailand who reduce carbon emissions from agricultural processing factories. Criticism of carbon markets may not recognize their importance if it ignores the information practices through which they are made and global problems to which they are addressed. The study of "Earth's data" helps emphasize the anthropological significance of carbon markets. Specifically, carbon regulation seeks to ensure Earth's future habitability by managing the chemical composition of the planetary atmosphere. [climate change, carbon markets, information infrastructure, global assemblage, planetary atmosphere, chemistry, quantification, Thailand] RESUMEN Los mercados de carbono son el mecanismo regulatorio primario para confrontar el cambio climático. Este artículo analiza las prácticas de información a través de las cuales los mercados de carbono conectan las reducciones locales en emisiones de carbono con la atmósfera planetaria como tal. Los mercados de carbono y prácticas contables relacionadas son una forma especial de lo que Kim Fortun llama "informating environmentalism," esto es, la delineación de cuestiones ambientales en problemas que pueden ser manejados por sistemas de
Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020
This collection of essays seeks to reinvigorate ethnographic investigation of the contemporary gl... more This collection of essays seeks to reinvigorate ethnographic investigation of the contemporary global. At a moment afflicted by transnational pandemic, political chauvinism, and disciplinary retrenchment, they offer a model for reengagement with the global. Critical work in anthropology over a decade ago was published when optimism over a “borderless world” still held sway. In the intervening years, globalization has bequeathed a world of viral contagion, authoritarian nationalism, immigration backlash, sclerotic trade regimes, and intensifying ecological crisis. Nonetheless, if the promise of globalization appears to have evaporated, global problems have redoubled in their importance for an engaged anthropology, as both the recent resurgence of nationalism and the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate. This collection of essays features research and reflection that address the global as a problem space through middle-range analysis. Inspired by the landmark work of Aihwa Ong, the essays embody a distinctive form of ethnographic engagement with the contemporary global.
Charting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines the cultural h... more Charting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines the cultural history of climate change under three broad headings: history, writing and politics. Climate change compels us to rethink many of our traditional means of historical understanding, and demands new ways of relating human knowledge, action and representations to the dimensions of geological and evolutionary time. To address these challenges, this book positions our present moment of climatic knowledge within much longer histories of climatic experience. Only in light of these histories, it argues, can we properly understand what climate means today across an array of discursive domains, from politics, literature and law to activism and neighbourly conversation. Its chapters identify turning points and experiments in the construction of climates and of atmospheres of sensation. They examine how contemporary ecological thought has repoliticised the representation of nature and detail vital aspects of the history and prehistory of our climatic modernity. This groundbreaking text will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in environmental history, environmental governance, history of ideas and science, literature and eco-criticism, political theory and cultural theory, as well as all general readers interested in climate change.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020
Resource regimes in postsocialist Laos have been dominated by foreign actors in ways that frequen... more Resource regimes in postsocialist Laos have been dominated by foreign actors in ways that frequently dovetail with the prerogatives of multilateral investment and the work of nongovernmental development organizations. A common theme among these diverse actors is that the Lao government regularly delegates certain kinds of governing activity to these foreign actors, resulting in specific territories over which foreign organizations can frequently play a dominating role, albeit in highly diverse and idiosyncratic ways. Following on Ong’s concept of graduated sovereignty, I term these governance regimes sustainability enclaves, noting that they frequently revolve around resource extraction, and that “sustainability” broadly construed characterizes contestation over how development should take place. Sustainability enclaves are the outcome of a postsocialist policy of cautious openness toward foreign actors. They involve specific but heterogeneous governance regimes that can and frequen...
Cultural Anthropology, Nov 2, 2012
ephemera, 2001
In this article I describe the post-Copenhagen moment in carbon markets and climate politics as o... more In this article I describe the post-Copenhagen moment in carbon markets and climate politics as one characterised by deep uncertainty. Uncertainty describes the social experience of emerging climate policy, but it is also business strategy. Uncertainty is necessary for ...
Forum for Development Studies, 2012
This article describes an attempt to collaborate by a major hydropower firm in Laos with an activ... more This article describes an attempt to collaborate by a major hydropower firm in Laos with an activist NGO that had forced the company to deal with the environmental problems it had caused. The collaboration demonstrates activists’ destructuring effects on hydropower development institutions over the past three decades through a case study that can be examined in detail. Against the threat of greenwashing or other forms of sustainability communication, the attempt to forge a way to neutrally evaluate environmental claims both was doomed to fail and simply replicated, rather than resolved, the institutional conditions of contested hydropower. I argue that activists have denaturalized expert knowledge through systematic denial of authoritative expertise, while in turn creating the condition for sustainability enclaves that can take root wherever contestation makes its mark. This view comes from attention paid to risk management and its close relation to media, including durable environmental relations that function as ‘new media’ crucial for transnational activist networks.
Anthropological Theory, 2013
The climate change fingerprint, bellwether and model event are three epistemic figures through wh... more The climate change fingerprint, bellwether and model event are three epistemic figures through which it may be possible to know the future through attention to specific material relations. They offer an emergent grammar to help make sense of the rapid transformations in planetary ecology over the past decade due to climate change. What was before experienced as modeled scenarios about future change is now increasingly confirmed. But the experience is characterized equally by uncertainties about the precise implications of these global changes. These terms demonstrate explicit reflection on uncertainty through material practices of thinking, what I identify as a kind of speculative materialism. What becomes apparent is that anthropology itself is at stake to the extent that anthropogenic climate change problematizes the ecological dimensions of Earth at home. I propose the term viability to explore thresholds of ecological value that are not uniquely tied to human observers and which...
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2016
Introduction to the special issue Climate Transformations
Various hacker, maker and DIYbio activities in recent years around the world mark the start of th... more Various hacker, maker and DIYbio activities in recent years around the world mark the start of the global Hackerspace culture and its alternative networks of knowledge creation and sharing. The global flow of open data, kits and scientific protocols in these alternative R&D centers serves the needs of a striving, tinkering and geeky culture, which is often perceived as an underground without any ambitions to influence the policy makers or interact with the large public. Should we label these activates as just another case of popularization and dissemination of the professional research knowledge similar to some science amateurs and citizen science activities? Should we emphasize the start up and entrepreneurship ethos and its search for commercialization of various technologies similar to the goals on any start up incubator? Should we have a closer look into the art and design activities happening across various Hackerspaces that create a tension with the more mundane but also techn...
Public Culture, 2016
Singapore climate change adaptation planning for water infrastructure is assessed against the con... more Singapore climate change adaptation planning for water infrastructure is assessed against the concept of “vital security systems.” Cast against the historicity of water planning and postcolonial urbanism, water supply, coastal protection, and flood control are understood in terms of vigilance, emergency, prediction, and control. It is argued that climate adaptation planning relies on a naturalistic understanding of predictable, linear transformations in base climatic variables and thus fails to take into consideration the “pluripotency” of climate futures—that is, the inherent unpredictability of nonlinear transformations that arise in the conjunction of human and nonhuman systems.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13534640802159138, Jun 18, 2008
... 2. See Jerome Whitington, The Simulation of Politics: Developmental natures in Lao hydropower... more ... 2. See Jerome Whitington, The Simulation of Politics: Developmental natures in Lao hydropower (Berkeley: University of California, 2008 [forthcoming]), PhD Dissertation. The term viability has been influenced by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. ...
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Papers by Jerome Whitington
The first part of this essay traces the powers of a dammed river through the dreams of engineers, through the primacy of volume and the maximum asymmetry created by hydropower infrastructure. Adopting the perspective of a living river, it follows the course of the water through the erosion of the riparian environment and the erosion of the livelihoods of people who depend on the river. The second part of the essay takes up the experience of harm in the context of social abandonment by laying out one version of planetarity today. Hydropower as a planetary condition offers one way to examine our very powerful, very rapidly transforming earth, as when knowledge about how to live or how to exist fails in the face of a planet that has become increasingly unrecognizable.
I.
Rivers are powerful, energetic. One of their powers is to provoke a fantastical imagination, a dreamworld of their magnificence betwixt the gravitational pull of the earth and the massiveness of the planet’s charged, sun-driven hydrology. How does one fantasize the power of the river? In dreams, the river is harnessed. The river expresses the barely constrained powers of the horse, muscled instrument of war and paradigm of conquest. The curved face of the concrete dam, sixty-five meters high and nearly half a kilometer long, restrains more than two billion cubic meters of water, or two billion tons of potential energy. Although every dam is unique, this could be any dam for each is specific yet generalizable. This one bridges a tributary of the Mekong in central Laos, wedged between Thailand and Vietnam. The rippling skin of the reservoir calmly expresses tremendous lines of force that delicately balance each other. The dam presents a power that need not raise its voice, a presence consolidated by the mere fact of its existence. “The imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact.” (Haraway, 1997). A catastrophe is held in engineered abeyance.
The fantasy involves a maximum possible asymmetry, an ontological cut in the riparian ecology. The asymmetry is expressed in numbers, which characterize something like a technological sublime, forever impressed by its own feats of accomplishment. Four hundred sixty megawatts of electricity, 220 cubic meters per second of water flow, 18 percent rate of return. (Power is always an asymmetry.) The numbers roll around uneasily in the mouths of critical social scientists, like marbles, begging for some more familiar scale of the human. For the dam in question, the engineered structures suture together two adjacent rivers: the water is tunneled five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge, where it drops 230 meters in elevation to gain the maximum head pressure the topography will allow. Volume x Pressure = Power. The cut is ontological because it recognizes the river in one specific way that excludes or reconfigures other possibilities for the river’s existence. Although it takes time, all other variables, all other life relations rework themselves around this minimal relation forged between gravity and hydrology. The engineers are the first to conform to the exigencies of the calculations. (They have been doing it their whole lives, learning to stoop and bow to the numbers.)
Confronted with incredulity or whispered accusations of hubris, engineers roll back on their heels and laugh in their bright confidence. Christine Folch (2016) observes that these huge numbers “can be difficult to envision because of their sheer scale, but they are necessary for understanding how sovereignty and nature are tied up in the energy from the dam.” The question concerns the legal status of the state’s claim over nature, before it is distributed as property or rights to its use are leased under contract. The volume of water held by the dam represents a calculated compromise between the engineers’ dream of what is possible, the shape of the earth, and the statistical mass of rainfall in the catchment above. The engineers are confident because only they bring together the sovereignty of capital with the sovereignty of the nation state. The dam’s design is the engineer’s offering to the sovereign claim to the dominion of the earth, bequeathed to investors with the words “concession” and “royalties.”
Émosson dam in Switzerland
[Figure]. The author plays atop maximum asymmetry at the Émosson dam in Switzerland, 2023. To place one’s body near the dam is to exist adjacent to the immensity of its power, and to the powers that built and own it. It is hard not to feel impressed, and cowed, even for people whose lives have been irrevocably cut by its presence. The international border between France and Switzerland was moved slightly to accommodate the jointly developed, binational project. To maintain parity between the countries, the Émosson dam is located wholly in Switzerland while the power generation facilities are wholly in France. I am grateful to Nant de Drance SA and to Mark Goodale and the energy transitions workshop at the University of Lausanne for the tour of this facility. Photo courtesy of Zeynep Oguz.
Four tunnels carry the water from the reservoir to a much smaller, adjacent river, about five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge. Enclosed by 28-centimeter-thick concrete walls and spanning seven meters in diameter, the tunnels are capable of withstanding a water hammer event, which is an unexpected shock wave capable of rupturing the engineering works. Imagine water filling a tube five kilometers long, seven meters across, moving at roughly a steady walking pace—imagine it slamming to a halt, surging. Something like 200,000 tons? (A back of the envelope calculation.) That is a water hammer event. The numbers index what Henrietta Moore (1994) has called a “passion for difference” in which volume is the priority of an ontological program that overrules every other aspiration.
volume-retention-flow, water-electricity-capital, from one current to the next
difference. above/below, potential/kinetic, Laos/Thailand, investment/return
Before/after. The construction of the dam is also a cut in time. The dam itself is an ecological event. To be sure, anticipation of the dam is a reminder that the event of the dam does not begin absolutely with the concrete structure, nor is the closure of its gates its culmination. All catastrophe is process, ongoing in slowness and fastness. All catastrophe provokes an opening, an unanswerable question of what has happened to us, which is not an experience that can be relegated to the past.
One fastness is the inevitability of erosion. The water released through the power turbines flows into a narrow channel, the Nam Hai, before it makes its way to the Hinboun river and then to the Mekong. The Nam Hai services a modest catchment. In its geological existence, the Nam Hai has never been asked to carry more water than this catchment could afford. Certainly, major floods occur whenever a tropical storm from the South China Sea breaks over the Annamite range. These floods had the historical effect of sculpting the riparian plains, depositing fresh layers of sediment, and flushing out deep pools, riffles and rapids.
With the ongoing operations of the dam, thousands of tons of sediment now travel downstream in waves along the riverbed. The rapids—essential breeding grounds—have become smothered in sand. Gravel has filled the deep pools that were once fishing waters covetously guarded by villagers against opportunistic outsiders. The channel has become much wider and shallower in a process that will take decades if not longer to stabilize. The banks are undercut by the current and the river eats the adjacent paddy. The difference between land and water has become unstable. Wet/dry is not an asymmetry, when the soil is in the water and the water flows across the land, a shimmering indifference across time. In slowness and fastness, the river reconfigures itself around the demands of its new infrastructural duties. In doing so, it also changes something of the nature of its existence. The river has become a drainage.
The erosion is a function of a specific, new resonance. The dam produces electricity tethered to economic demand across the Mekong in Thailand.
All the electricity from this powerhouse is not for Lao people. These 460 megawatts are reserved for northeast Thailand’s provincial capitalism, where demand ebbs and flows according to its own temporality. As the towns and villages awaken, the turbines rise to meet their day in a predictable pattern. Demand peaks in the afternoons and evenings, varying along with the strengt...
The first part of this essay traces the powers of a dammed river through the dreams of engineers, through the primacy of volume and the maximum asymmetry created by hydropower infrastructure. Adopting the perspective of a living river, it follows the course of the water through the erosion of the riparian environment and the erosion of the livelihoods of people who depend on the river. The second part of the essay takes up the experience of harm in the context of social abandonment by laying out one version of planetarity today. Hydropower as a planetary condition offers one way to examine our very powerful, very rapidly transforming earth, as when knowledge about how to live or how to exist fails in the face of a planet that has become increasingly unrecognizable.
I.
Rivers are powerful, energetic. One of their powers is to provoke a fantastical imagination, a dreamworld of their magnificence betwixt the gravitational pull of the earth and the massiveness of the planet’s charged, sun-driven hydrology. How does one fantasize the power of the river? In dreams, the river is harnessed. The river expresses the barely constrained powers of the horse, muscled instrument of war and paradigm of conquest. The curved face of the concrete dam, sixty-five meters high and nearly half a kilometer long, restrains more than two billion cubic meters of water, or two billion tons of potential energy. Although every dam is unique, this could be any dam for each is specific yet generalizable. This one bridges a tributary of the Mekong in central Laos, wedged between Thailand and Vietnam. The rippling skin of the reservoir calmly expresses tremendous lines of force that delicately balance each other. The dam presents a power that need not raise its voice, a presence consolidated by the mere fact of its existence. “The imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact.” (Haraway, 1997). A catastrophe is held in engineered abeyance.
The fantasy involves a maximum possible asymmetry, an ontological cut in the riparian ecology. The asymmetry is expressed in numbers, which characterize something like a technological sublime, forever impressed by its own feats of accomplishment. Four hundred sixty megawatts of electricity, 220 cubic meters per second of water flow, 18 percent rate of return. (Power is always an asymmetry.) The numbers roll around uneasily in the mouths of critical social scientists, like marbles, begging for some more familiar scale of the human. For the dam in question, the engineered structures suture together two adjacent rivers: the water is tunneled five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge, where it drops 230 meters in elevation to gain the maximum head pressure the topography will allow. Volume x Pressure = Power. The cut is ontological because it recognizes the river in one specific way that excludes or reconfigures other possibilities for the river’s existence. Although it takes time, all other variables, all other life relations rework themselves around this minimal relation forged between gravity and hydrology. The engineers are the first to conform to the exigencies of the calculations. (They have been doing it their whole lives, learning to stoop and bow to the numbers.)
Confronted with incredulity or whispered accusations of hubris, engineers roll back on their heels and laugh in their bright confidence. Christine Folch (2016) observes that these huge numbers “can be difficult to envision because of their sheer scale, but they are necessary for understanding how sovereignty and nature are tied up in the energy from the dam.” The question concerns the legal status of the state’s claim over nature, before it is distributed as property or rights to its use are leased under contract. The volume of water held by the dam represents a calculated compromise between the engineers’ dream of what is possible, the shape of the earth, and the statistical mass of rainfall in the catchment above. The engineers are confident because only they bring together the sovereignty of capital with the sovereignty of the nation state. The dam’s design is the engineer’s offering to the sovereign claim to the dominion of the earth, bequeathed to investors with the words “concession” and “royalties.”
Émosson dam in Switzerland
[Figure]. The author plays atop maximum asymmetry at the Émosson dam in Switzerland, 2023. To place one’s body near the dam is to exist adjacent to the immensity of its power, and to the powers that built and own it. It is hard not to feel impressed, and cowed, even for people whose lives have been irrevocably cut by its presence. The international border between France and Switzerland was moved slightly to accommodate the jointly developed, binational project. To maintain parity between the countries, the Émosson dam is located wholly in Switzerland while the power generation facilities are wholly in France. I am grateful to Nant de Drance SA and to Mark Goodale and the energy transitions workshop at the University of Lausanne for the tour of this facility. Photo courtesy of Zeynep Oguz.
Four tunnels carry the water from the reservoir to a much smaller, adjacent river, about five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge. Enclosed by 28-centimeter-thick concrete walls and spanning seven meters in diameter, the tunnels are capable of withstanding a water hammer event, which is an unexpected shock wave capable of rupturing the engineering works. Imagine water filling a tube five kilometers long, seven meters across, moving at roughly a steady walking pace—imagine it slamming to a halt, surging. Something like 200,000 tons? (A back of the envelope calculation.) That is a water hammer event. The numbers index what Henrietta Moore (1994) has called a “passion for difference” in which volume is the priority of an ontological program that overrules every other aspiration.
volume-retention-flow, water-electricity-capital, from one current to the next
difference. above/below, potential/kinetic, Laos/Thailand, investment/return
Before/after. The construction of the dam is also a cut in time. The dam itself is an ecological event. To be sure, anticipation of the dam is a reminder that the event of the dam does not begin absolutely with the concrete structure, nor is the closure of its gates its culmination. All catastrophe is process, ongoing in slowness and fastness. All catastrophe provokes an opening, an unanswerable question of what has happened to us, which is not an experience that can be relegated to the past.
One fastness is the inevitability of erosion. The water released through the power turbines flows into a narrow channel, the Nam Hai, before it makes its way to the Hinboun river and then to the Mekong. The Nam Hai services a modest catchment. In its geological existence, the Nam Hai has never been asked to carry more water than this catchment could afford. Certainly, major floods occur whenever a tropical storm from the South China Sea breaks over the Annamite range. These floods had the historical effect of sculpting the riparian plains, depositing fresh layers of sediment, and flushing out deep pools, riffles and rapids.
With the ongoing operations of the dam, thousands of tons of sediment now travel downstream in waves along the riverbed. The rapids—essential breeding grounds—have become smothered in sand. Gravel has filled the deep pools that were once fishing waters covetously guarded by villagers against opportunistic outsiders. The channel has become much wider and shallower in a process that will take decades if not longer to stabilize. The banks are undercut by the current and the river eats the adjacent paddy. The difference between land and water has become unstable. Wet/dry is not an asymmetry, when the soil is in the water and the water flows across the land, a shimmering indifference across time. In slowness and fastness, the river reconfigures itself around the demands of its new infrastructural duties. In doing so, it also changes something of the nature of its existence. The river has become a drainage.
The erosion is a function of a specific, new resonance. The dam produces electricity tethered to economic demand across the Mekong in Thailand.
All the electricity from this powerhouse is not for Lao people. These 460 megawatts are reserved for northeast Thailand’s provincial capitalism, where demand ebbs and flows according to its own temporality. As the towns and villages awaken, the turbines rise to meet their day in a predictable pattern. Demand peaks in the afternoons and evenings, varying along with the strengt...
Conference of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, hosted by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, 28 May - 1 June 2012
practice, then one of the problems to be considered is that businesses are often de facto in the position of contending with any number of issues tangential to what they consider their core economic activity. It seems reasonable to suppose, therefore, that business knowledge deploys its own vernacular materialism and related modalities of skill and expertise when it comes to managing socioecological relations. I propose a stronger claim, namely that management is the hegemonic form of living with late industrial environments. Anna Tsing asks for an anthropology that can “stimulate a vocabulary for livable disturbance—a first step in coming to terms with the anthropogenic environment our species has created” (2015, 93). “Given the realities of disturbances we do not like, how shall we live” (92)? I here take up management to pursue a pragmatics of anthropogenic ecologies from within the framework of capitalist enterprise itself.