Infrastructural Brutalism by Michael Truscello

Author:Michael Truscello [Truscello, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: infrastructure; brutalism; necropolitics; brisantic politics; concrete; drowned town narratives; Snowpiercer; The Road; Cormac McCarthy; modernism; megastructures
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Alien Capitalism and the Dark Ecology of Burtynsky and Epstein

The content of Burtynsky’s and Epstein’s photographs invites an associationalist perspective on the relationships between energy and landscapes. More specifically, Burtynsky and Epstein evoke some of the implications of Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology”: in the way they “linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference,”92 in the way their images are “dark but not suicidal,”93 and in the way they foreground “hyperobjects,” materials that will “far outlast current social and biological forms.”94 In Ecology without Nature, Morton declares that his work is “about an ‘ecology to come,’ not about no ecology at all.”95 The idea of “nature,” so explicitly foregrounded in the photography of Ansel Adams and reconfigured in the New Topographics, “will have to wither away in an ‘ecological’ state of human society,” says Morton.96 “Substantialist images of a palpable, distinct ‘nature’ embodied in at least one actually existing phenomenon (a particular species, a particular figure),” he claims, “generate authoritarian forms of collective organization.”97 Morton’s project is to deconstruct “nature” to the point where it no longer registers, resulting in what he calls “the ecological thought,” the “thinking of interconnectedness” and a form of thinking “that is ecological.”98

The concept of dark ecology is a “melancholy ethics”99 that “preserves the dark, depressive quality of life in the shadow of ecological catastrophe.”100 Morton believes “we can’t mourn for the environment because we are so deeply attached to it—we are it”;101 instead, deep ecology is “saturated with unrequited longing,” “a politicized version of deconstructive hesitation or aporia.”102 In this chapter, I have suggested repeatedly that Burtynsky and Epstein represent this kind of ambivalence in their photographs, even in the face of certain catastrophe, though some might challenge this reading, perhaps not seeing the same ambivalence or irony. To this objection, I would promote dark ecology as a more ethical response to these photographs than the perspective that sees only arborescent capture; as Morton writes, “We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess that we’re in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing ‘hauntology’ (Derrida’s phrase) rather than ontology.”103 Burtynsky’s SOCAR Oil Fields #4 exemplifies “the sticky mess that we’re in,” pausing at an abandoned oil field in Baku, Azerbaijan, to see its haunted reflection in a pool of dirt and oil. Dark ecology also promotes lines of flight that interrupt the intersection of nation and nature, cadastral map and the ecological thought. “Later in the modern period,” Morton writes in Ecology without Nature, “the idea of the nation-state emerged as a way of going beyond the authority of the monarch. The nation all too often depends upon the very same list that evokes the idea of nature.”104 Deconstructing the synoptic view of the state conjoins with the ecological thought, when contemplating and practicing the ecology to come.

Nowhere in these collections of photographs does one find an image that intimates a possible return to some form of pristine natural world; instead, viewers must confront the

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