It is nearly evenly divided into chapters about commodities (oil, bananas) and wildlife (otters, whales) and thus avoids being one of the "history of a manufactured item" books that were once popular. I think that it succeeds in being a useful look at infrastructure and ecological aspects of its politics through the lens of one of the largest ports in the US.
The above is as much of a book review as I usually write: the rest of this is going to be about some ideas that I examined through the book -- not an exhaustive look at what the book is about, but where it contributed to my particular interests in ecology and infrastructure.
The Infrastructure of Delay
The book contains a description of one of the archetypal industry/wildlife interactions in American media: seabirds covered in oil and cleaned by professionals or volunteers, with uncertain results. Chapter I: "Precariously Perched in a Port", is largely about this interaction, with bird rescuers funded by Chevron or Proctor & Gamble, descriptions of "slow violence" done to the local ecology, declining populations of birds and action taken as reaction to incidents, and (throughout the book) the general idea that ecological protection exists only insofar as it will not impede trade or military use of the port. What should people make of a building labelled the Los Angeles Oiled Bird Care and Education Center, designed to treat up to a thousand birds in a spill and run by a nonprofit with ties to both government and industry?
My first impulse would have been to describe all of this as a public relations exercise, but it is not quite that. There is an actual building with actual full-time employees doing ongoing care of actual birds. This building is part of the infrastructure of the port -- a kind of infrastructure that manages public permission for the activities of the port to go on as usual. Thinking about this was probably the most useful part of the book for my particular concerns.
What does it actually do? The answer isn't nothing, and the answer is also not "it protects birds". Actually protecting them would require taking more expensive measures to reduce oil spills and other stressors before they happen. I think that it's best thought of as an infrastructure of ecological delay. The various interventions for birds, otters, and whales are not exactly adequate, but they do make it so that populations slowly are reduced rather than vanishing all at once. It's possible that they even may work and have populations recover, which would be all to the good as far as the port is concerned -- as long as trade and industry are not interfered with. This infrastructure of delay handles an important constraint on the port: charismatic megafauna and its accompanying public involvement in politics.
"Infrastructural Vitalism": Alive or Dead?
One of the concepts that the book coins as a phrase is "infrastructural vitalism": how managers treat ports, pipelines, and freeways as alive and as living systems that must be protected. Illustrative phrases mentioned are like "the health of the nation depends on the flow of commercial goods" or "the freeway is the spine of the region." It consists of:
"[...] heavily managed, industrial infrastructure which, I argue, is stuctured by industrial logics and possesses a 'life force' of its own. I do not mean that this infrastructure literally is alive, but an animistic belief in infrastructure's life force motivates its creators and maintainers. This belief does real work in the world -- and, ironically, is often deadly for biological life." [pg. 5]
Infrastructural vitalism is an interesting concept, but I do not agree with it as described. Is it really a belief, or is it a metaphor (economic activity is full of metaphors), or an excuse? How could we prove that creators and maintainers of core industrial capacity have an animistic belief, as opposed to someone figuring out that this is a good turn of phrase to put in a newspaper article? How would the managers, if interviewed, even know whether this is an actual belief that they hold or a rationalization, not much thought about, that they heard once and adopted because they like to feel good about what they do when questioned?
But that is a negative objection and I will lay out an alternative positive model: that of a basic difference between what the public thinks of as the purpose of a profession and what that profession or role institutionally does. The classic example is policing. People think that police forces are there to catch criminals and protect the public, but in terms of both policy and actual behavior they are not: they are there to enforce public order (including "racial order") and protect wealthy people's property. Critically, you could not find this view of the police by interviewing cops, who would either actually believe in protecting the public / catching criminals or would at least say that they do.
In a similar way, the purpose of local politicians is to sell their area to capital. People think that politicians do something else, but the important parts of cities like roads and sewers and electricity are run by technocratic managers: politicians and rare appointed high-level managers handle the interface between the area and business. If selling the area to business is helped along by propounding infrastructural vitalism, that may be done, but if the public's favored metaphors change the justifications will also change, because the activity itself can not change. The port presents itself as a part of America's bloodstream, the place where software design happens presents itself as a cyberpunk landscape ("Silicon Valley"), and the Southern states dependent on cheap labor reject metaphor altogether and put up signs on the roadways telling businesses that unions are discouraged in their state, but it is all to the same end. Politicians may have to try to attract new business but an area with an already paid for infrastructural sunk cost offers a steadier line of work which generally is only given up due to some catastrophic market change.
A minor observation -- perhaps the book included this somewhere, I'm sorry if I'm only repeating it -- I think it's instructive that in this case the infrastructural vitalism is coming from the Port of Long Beach, which is administered by the City of Long Beach. The nearby port of Los Angeles is larger, but the book does not focus on it because its records are not as easy to obtain. So the Port of Long Beach is a centrally managed important piece of infrastructure which is not one of the grandfathered in Federal ones, but instead is run by a local public entity. It is therefore in the strictest sense un-American. They may have need of organic metaphors about how the place grew and demands life on its own in order to disguise this.
Infrastructuralism
The book raises the question of whether ports could become managed in a different way, under a different system, in order to actually protect ecosystems and as a kind of measurement and enforcement point for communal decisions about how we will treat products coming from elsewhere (how labor is treated where the products are from, for instance). My political commitments don't lead me to examine this idea strongly as a possible element of our system, and if our system is ever replaced I have no idea what might happen.
Instead I'm going to write a bit about my own most successful idea about the constraints of infrastructure, the clumsily named Infrastructuralism, which claims that people use whatever infrastructure is available and that infrastructural use can only be changed only by actually building-and-debuilding. This blog post predicted (at least to me) events such as the Yellow Vest protests taking down the French carbon tax, and the syndrome in the US where mothballed coal-burning power plants are bought and restarted by cryptocurrency miners. How would it apply to a port?
In many ways it's a statement about how we handle sunk costs. When an item of infrastructure is brought down by negative externalities, the business that ran it may go bankrupt, but the infrastructure often remains. Part of the system of capitalism is that these negative exernalities if they are taken into account at all are often applied to the business and are mysteriously set to zero again for a new purchaser. In addition, infrastructure that is brought down by economic forces only awaits a market upturn or a new use (see e.g. the Jevons paradox) to be turned back on again.
In this sense the sunk cost of investments made into the infrastructure of the port ensure that the port is going to continue to be used somehow, for as long as economic activity continues to increase. It will always be cheaper for someone doing some marginal use to turn things on again (the book, for example, explains how bananas were diverted back to less developed ports that had fewer investments in containerized cargo, because bananas don't use that and the less developed ports are cheaper / less crowded).
In this sense the current metaphors for infrastructure are Lovecraftian -- for instance, market as shoggoth. The port is not a living thing that must be cared for and that serves as a part of our communal body: it is the corpse-city of R'lyeh, and what has never lived can never truly die.
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