In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, ...planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
THE Enclave Appel, Hannah
The Licit Life of Capitalism,
12/2019
Book Chapter
Every Wednesday since roughly 1999, “the wives” have gathered for two hours of food, drink, and a card game called Continental in the well-appointed home of whoever agreed to hostess that week.¹ ...These women — the wives of migrant oil and gas company management assigned to Equatorial Guinea — socialize, plan charity projects, trade coffee beans for Crystal Light, and relax over cards, casseroles, nachos, crudités, cakes, and Diet Coke. Although far from the only scheduled weekly activity these women shared, which included mahjong, stitching, water aerobics, tennis, and calligraphy among others, cards was the most popular and the longest
THE Offshore Appel, Hannah
The Licit Life of Capitalism,
12/2019
Book Chapter
The helicopter touched down gingerly on the rig, and João, the rig’s safety coordinator, immediately whisked me to the radio room for a safety training mini-course on video. After administering an ...exam that tested my comprehension, João had me sign a liability waiver and then put me in my required personal protective equipment (PPE) of hardhat, safety glasses, gloves, ear-plugs, coveralls, and steel toe boots. A gregarious Brazilian capoeirista and vegetarian in his late forties, João had been in the offshore oil and gas business for twenty-eight years, and had been on this particular drilling rig — which I’ll call
THE Subcontract Appel, Hannah
The Licit Life of Capitalism,
12/2019
Book Chapter
By the time I came to know Eduardo in 2008, he had been a Voxa employee for three years. Voxa is an Equatoguinean-owned subcontracting firm whose business it is to provide local laborers to ...international oil and oil services companies, a labor-brokering niche widely referred to in the global oil industry and beyond as a “body shop.”¹ Foreign firms with operations in Equatorial Guinea pay Voxa per worker hired; Voxa takes a cut of each payment, and then pays their employees what remains. Among other contractual stipulations, the body shop guarantees the cleanliness, sobriety, and punctuality of the workers they
Hannah Appel's notion of "modularity" in her analysis of contemporary transnational oil operations exquisitely captures the work required to create the illusion that petroleum production is removed ...from and uncompromised by local entanglements. Her study belies the notion (peddled by the industry) that the extraction of crude oil is a technoscientific wonder detached from disruptive inequalities and tumultuous political conditions that too frequently haunt places where oil development occurs. In this commentary, I sketch two directions for further research inspired by Appel's work that could extend the disentangling calculus of corporate profit, liability, and risk. One centers on the corporate form and the other on the financialization of risk.
In this interview David Graeber discusses the radical politics of his childhood, his own political trajectory through the globalization movement, and how Occupy Wall Street both emerged and departed ...from that genealogy. Turning to questions of intensifying financialization in recent years, Graeber takes analysts to task for not understanding the relationship between private debt and finance — that far from making value out of nothing, finance has been making value out of the income and debt streams of working- and middle-class people. As he traces his own intellectual ancestry from Marx to Mauss to economic anthropologist Keith Hart, Graeber also shares his vision of the present moment, in which the cancellation of private debts in some form seems inevitable and the democratization of finance and the money-creation system, increasingly possible.
In this interview David Graeber discusses the radical politics of his childhood, his own political trajectory through the globalization movement, and how Occupy Wall Street both emerged and departed ...from that genealogy. Turning to questions of intensifying financialization in recent years, Graeber takes analysts to task for not understanding the relationship between private debt and finance -- that far from making value out of nothing, finance has been making value out of the income and debt streams of working- and middle-class people. As he traces his own intellectual ancestry from Marx to Mauss to economic anthropologist Keith Hart, Graeber also shares his vision of the present moment, in which the cancellation of private debts in some form seems inevitable and the democratization of finance and the money-creation system, increasingly possible. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. An electronic version of this article can be accessed via the internet at http://journals.cambridge.org
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