The Violent Technologies of Extraction by Alexander Dunlap & Jostein Jakobsen

Author:Alexander Dunlap & Jostein Jakobsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030268527
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusion

The teeth and claws of the Worldeater, we have shown in this chapter, are many, powerful and adapting to new circumstances and political reactions. While the Worldeater’s ripping and shredding continues, it sometimes happens in plain sight, sometimes stealthily in the dark, and often done with gusto by humans that believe in the war to be fought, to advance the nation or extractivism and security. This chapter offers an inventory of violent technologies of extraction that require acknowledgment, but also careful scrutiny and development in future research. We need to study how and when the teeth and claws do their work—a task that has been undertaken in the research examining imperial relationships in general, but in more detail in the works focusing on land control and territorialization. We see here how natural resource extraction is made acceptable or livable to humans as the social engineering of extraction proceeds apace as the political ecology of counterinsurgency animates and locates the politico-historical techniques of violence employed.

The Worldeater—techno-capitalist progress—exists and subsists on war, violence and trauma, as Perlman (2010) taught us. If there is one thing the long techno-capitalist trajectory—with its sequence of worms, octopuses and Leviathanic beasts—teaches us, it is that we should not underestimate the cunning, shapeshifting and ever-evolving ability to devise new violent technologies that not only repress human agency, but also possess it. Social engineering is a technical term for possessing human agency. The Worldeater is a conversation of possession, addiction, dependency and blindness that are accomplished through civil-military interventions (or so-called security strategies, see Bachmann et al. 2015) and solidified by politics. Hence, Patrick Wolfe’s (2006: 388) now famous assertion: ‘invasion is a structure not an event’. Existing inventories morph, new tools are invented, older ones converted and transformed—as this chapter has shown in the context of the ‘green’ economy. Or, in our preferred terms, the Worldeater sharpens its teeth and claws at any and all opposition to fulfilling its rapacious hunger for consuming human and non-human natures. This intensifies at the current conjuncture as extractivism reveals its totalizing tensions. Chapter 5 proceeds to uncover how the drive toward total extractivism increasingly blurs the lines between conventional and ‘green’ forms of extraction, revealing the outline of the systemically colonizing grid of the Worldeater.

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