On the Shore: Thinking Water at a Prospective Mining Site in Northern Norway

ABSTRACT

Drawing on material from a projected copper mine development in northern Norway, the text explores and contrasts several ways in which water functions as a local “theory machine” to model, reflect, organize, intervene into, and think through relations. Working back from specific examples, it identifies three locally important modes for thinking (with) water: water as a constitutive metaphor, structuring particular ontologies of the social; water as a normative diagram, organizing potential future formations; and water as a kind of boundary, antagonistic (potentially) to the spatial logics of the capitalist resource extraction project. Situating these three “theory machines” of water within the current resource boom in northern Scandinavia, the text examines their potential valence—as figures for thinking through politics, sociality, and relations (human and otherwise) in an age defined, increasingly, by ecological upheavals.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• mining
• representation
• water

Notes

See http://www.nussir.no, accessed October 21, 2014.

See also Reinert (2007; 2012; 2014a; 2014b; 2015) and Reinert and Benjaminsen (2015).

The issue is of course not external to the language that renders it. In academic writing, as in other fields, water metaphors constitute aesthetic norms that structure thinking and practice: Arguments may or may not “flow,” readers may or may not be “immersed,” expositions may or may not be “dry.”