Where Are We Heading? by Ian Hodder
Author:Ian Hodder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
YOUR ENTANGLED CAR
I want to emphasize two points about these webs of dependency, these entanglements. First, they are heterogeneous. They include an enormous battery of diverse things, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the social to the economic, from inorganic matter to plant and animal. The things that opium brings together include guns, ships, tea, cotton, syringes, pipes, planes, environments, colonialism, empire, governments, and fears of communism. Actor network theory and the new materialisms have trained us to think of the mixed nature of these assemblages, but it is important to emphasize that entanglements are not simply networks but also webs of dependency.
Second, the entanglements are unbounded. Entanglement theory is radically nonreductionist. We saw with opium, for example, that distant events such as the use of pipes in the Americas can suddenly have an impact on its use in China. The invention of the hypodermic syringe can lead to an increase in opiate use in England. These quantum effects can be radical: The Vietnam War increases opium production in the Golden Triangle, and increased fighting in Afghanistan creates a new role for Corsican drug traffickers. Of course, we can attempt to deal with the rise in drug use in the United States by imprisoning users, legalizing drugs, or prescribing more methadone. But none of these approaches has been very successful. From an entanglement perspective, the reason is that these solutions attempt to deal with a small part of the whole. There is no one villain, such as the producers, traffickers, or consumers. The drug problem is diffuse and dispersed, and there is no boundary around it.
The wheel’s entanglements are also unbounded. Let us say that you want a new car, but an environmentally friendly one. Cost is not your primary concern, and you are dithering between a hybrid battery/gas vehicle and a purely electric plug-in. At first sight it seems evident that the electric car is more environmentally friendly, since it does not use carbon fuels. But if you follow the chains of entanglements, the picture gets less clear. If your local electricity comes from a coal-fired power plant, your electric car is actually a coal-powered car. Coal-burning power plants emit not just CO2 but other noxious gases like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide—and in far greater quantities than gas-powered cars. Also, power drains out of an electric battery even when the car is not in use. But a gas-using car depends on refining, processing, and transporting gas, all of which add to the carbon footprint. So the electric car wins out. But we can follow the entanglements still further. Electric cars need to be light, so they use high-performing materials like lithium in their batteries, and they use rare metals throughout—for example, in their ubiquitous magnets. The rare metals come from environmentally destructive mines that use toxic chemicals such as ammonium sulfate. Other mines have high emissions. When all this is taken into account, manufacturing an electric vehicle can produce more carbon emissions than a gas car.
We can pursue still other entanglements.
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