HYDROPOWER

Abstract

This essay reflects on the concept of “hydropower” – the corrosive power of seawater to amalgamate Life and Nonlife in the context of migrant deaths in the waters of the Mediterranean. Through a focus on drowned bodies’ dissolution and eventual sedimentation into their deep-sea surroundings, my approach interrelates the order of biopolitical violence enacted by Europe’s restrictive migration policies and the thick time of the geophysical. The degradation of bodies under the influence of hydropower reveals residual ontologies marked by porousness between embodied forms of Life and their geophysical environments, putting significant pressure on the putatively watertight divide between Life and Nonlife in the Anthropocene. Parsed from the lens of residuality, hydropower reveals humans’ full ontological coincidence with matter writ large, their endurance and solubility in geological life forces, but also the necessity to think agency in terms of human/inhuman continuity in excess of biopower’s regimenting forces. Against the attempted biopolitical suppression of a certain form of humanity, the residual dwelling enacted by hydropower champions the inclusion of new constellations of matter in our political thought processes.

Keywords:

• hydropower
• Life/Nonlife
• geopower/biopower
• residuality
• Anthropocene

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It would require more attention than I am able to dedicate here to fully parse the multiple considerations attached to the process of migrant decomposition as a matter of ethical and theoretical concern. I will direct the reader to my forthcoming essay “The Residual Migrant” for a more thorough discussion of these points.

2 My use of the concept of exposure shares some semantic territory with Stacy Alaimo’s notion in Exposed. However, as the rest of this essay will ascertain, it also complicates it in significant ways as Alaimo’s injunction to willfully expose oneself to the power of the elements rests on deliberate self-abandonment as a gesture of challenge to dichotomous logics of being. To rehearse Yusoff’s paradigm, Alaimo’s exposure indulges in “freedom from” rather than “coercion to,” at an angle to the devastating intrusion of necropolitical forces that hydropower reveals (Yusoff, “The Anthropocene” 207).

3 In Klein’s writing, “sacrifice zone” designates geographic areas permanently damaged by the extractive logic of the fossil fuel industry, though her critical horizon can unquestionably be extended to other exploitative paradigms. Deliberately laid to waste, these sacrificed areas also include their disenfranchised and indigenous residents. The casualties of extreme depredation, the environment and its inhabitants are united in a common position of abjection and deliberate destruction. They constitute the occulted and neglected underbelly of liberalism’s predatory nature. See also Iovino and Verdicchio; Oppermann.

4 I am referring to Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” here defined in relation to sovereignty:

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power [necropower]. (66)

5 A similar weaponization of the river Evros on the Greek border has been the object of recent scholarship (Duncan and Levidis). Likewise, Jason De León has shed light on the instrumentalization of the inhospitable environment of the Sonoran Desert to curtail clandestine crossings into the United States. See also Heller et al.

6 These instances of violence, at times overlapping with Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” paradigm, include topographical changes enacted through the redirection of the water bodies being exploited, as well as interruptions of wildlife migration patterns, environmental degradation, and loss of livelihood for struggling neighboring communities. This infrastructural approach to hydropower pits Western notions of sustainability (which here still abide by and reinforce the logic of economic gain and overconsumption, in this case of electricity) against ancestral socio-ecological concepts of land and water use. Such approach therefore articulates “structural forms of injustice and dispossession (both material and cultural)” that reaffirm a “vision of nature as commodity” (Blake and Barney 810).

7 Suvendrini Perera speaks of a “borderscape” uniting under its fractal concept “[a] geo-politico-cultural space, shaped by embedded colonial and neo-colonial histories and continuing conflicts over sovereignty, ownership, and identity” (206).

8 Shipwreck Modernity is also the title of Steve Mentz’s 2015 book on early modern ecological narratives.

9 Later work by Peters and Steinberg points out the limits of thinking water as wetness, calling instead for a consideration of “more-than-wet” water ontologies, i.e., ontologies taking into account the mutability of oceanic water, whose physical form spans the spectrum from ice to liquid to vaporized mist. In this new configuration the opposition between landed and aqueous logics loses some of its impact.

10 Grosz adopts a teleological approach here, insisting that

before there can be relations of oppression, that is relations between humans categorised according to the criteria that privilege particular groups, there must be relations of force that exist in an impersonal, preindividual form that are sometimes transformed into modes of ordering the human. (975; my emphasis)

We can laminate the human dissymmetry evoked by Grosz onto the kind of biopolitical ordering hinging on racialized, antagonistic imaginaries of Life. In a recent interview, Grosz also ascribes a spatial dimension to the process (Grosz et al. 133).

11 See Pugliese; Nair.