In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this “infrastructural brutalism”—a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures. Truscello explores the necropolitics of infrastructure—how infrastructure determines who may live and who must die—through the lens of artistic media. He examines the white settler nostalgia of “drowned town” fiction written after the Tennessee Valley Authority flooded rural areas for hydroelectric projects; argues that the road movie represents a struggle with liberal governmentality; considers the ruins of oil capitalism, as seen in photographic landscapes of postindustrial waste; and offers an account of “death train narratives” ranging from the history of the Holocaust to postapocalyptic fiction. Finally, he calls for “brisantic politics,” a culture of unmaking that is capable of slowing the advance of capitalist suicide. “Brisance” refers to the shattering effect of an explosive, but Truscello uses the term to signal a variety of practices for defeating infrastructural power. Brisantic politics, he warns, would require a reorientation of radical politics toward infrastructure, sabotage, and cascading destruction in an interconnected world.
...More
Book
Anna Domizia Bianco;
(2007)
Aqua ducta, aqua distribuita. La gestione delle risorse idriche in età romana
(/isis/citation/CBB876292839/)
Book
Kenny Cupers;
Catharina Gabrielsson;
Helena Mattsson;
(2020)
Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB454741476/)
Book
Jacob Doherty;
(2021)
Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability
(/isis/citation/CBB866747879/)
Book
Brigitte Le Normand;
(2014)
Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism
(/isis/citation/CBB400006870/)
Article
Waldemar Kuligowski;
(March 2019)
How “Poland Entered Europe”: The Motorway as a Space of Neoliberalism
(/isis/citation/CBB588990884/)
Book
Timothy Moss;
(2020)
Remaking Berlin: A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920–2020
(/isis/citation/CBB159764389/)
Book
Sonia Hirt;
(2014)
Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation
(/isis/citation/CBB187954773/)
Article
Katherine Chandler;
(2022)
Apartheid drone: Infrastructures of militarism and the hidden genealogies of the South African Seeker
(/isis/citation/CBB611340328/)
Book
Ashley Carse;
(2014)
Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal
(/isis/citation/CBB368970305/)
Article
Richard Hirsh;
(2013)
Fifteen Years Later: Whither Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System?
(/isis/citation/CBB706689708/)
Book
Cooper, Melinda;
(2008)
Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era
(/isis/citation/CBB878496149/)
Book
Christina E. Crawford;
(2022)
Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union
(/isis/citation/CBB502789446/)
Book
Laura Vaughan;
(2019)
Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography
(/isis/citation/CBB103799936/)
Article
Darcy Parks;
(2020)
Promises and Techno-Politics: Renewable Energy and Malmö’s Vision of a Climate-Smart City
(/isis/citation/CBB487720994/)
Book
Brian Phillips Murphy;
(2015)
Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic
(/isis/citation/CBB610727332/)
Book
David Gissen;
(2014)
Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB895088204/)
Book
Kirsten Rüther;
Martina Barker-ciganikova;
Daniela Waldburger;
Carl-philipp Bodenstein;
(2020)
The Politics of Housing in (Post-)Colonial Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB734427885/)
Book
Tom Scott-Smith;
(2020)
On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief
(/isis/citation/CBB138751996/)
Thesis
Shehab Ismail;
(2017)
Engineering Metropolis: Contagion, Capital, and the Making of British Colonial Cairo, 1882-1922
(/isis/citation/CBB998318630/)
Article
Govind Gopakumar;
(2020)
Regime of Congestion: Technopolitics of Mobility and Inequality in Bengaluru, India
(/isis/citation/CBB509543226/)
Be the first to comment!