Power Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind

If you are like most Americans, the book Power Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind might appear to be a slog through wired infrastructure systems that are only interesting when they break. As the text follows often forgotten wired transmission systems instead of more academically popular subjects like electric production or consumption, however, Professor of Latin American Studies Daniel L. Wuebben surprises on several levels. The book provides a kind of thought experiment revealing ways academics might listen to the American mind through culture and aesthetics. Wuebben’s analysis lets the social context speak for itself while also situating American wired experience in socially informed history of culture and technology and, to a lesser extent, within the practice of electricity infrastructure engineering and design. Throughout this work, Wuebben chooses to explain in robust detail rather than critically deconstruct.

Power Lined is not for the literary faint of heart. Wuebben wields historical electric metaphors starting with Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards’s terrified but ultimately “chosen” and beloved spiders dangling (on wires?) over the fires of hell in the sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Fifty pages later, Wuebben quotes Emerson’s American Renaissance poetry filled with the erotic unity and electric passion of raw nature, electric metaphors that make you wonder if less technologically advanced centuries had connections we can only imagine today. Through these historical metaphors, along with meaning making in more recent written and visual artifacts including film and recent advocacy efforts, Wuebben reveals both nineteenth-century domination of nature through electric infrastructure and the continued struggle against the alienating, soul-splitting power of technology used to accomplish this domination. Echoing Edwards and Emerson, Wuebben’s humanistic approach addresses both deterministic (i.e., implicit path dependence) and creative elements (i.e., human agency expressed in poetics) connected to the empire of wire stretching across the American landscape.

Power Lined also has a surprisingly geographic focus. Wuebben has a knack for uncovering historical or theoretical puzzles in work held dear to many geographers, dissecting this content through novel connections. Although there are too many of these cultural and technological confluences to mention, a short list includes the place of environmentalist Rachel Carson’s (1961) Silent Spring in research on electric infrastructure; a history of the Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) mindset starting with Maryland residents’ rejection of a 500-kilovolt line across their hunting grounds; the first appearance of electrical infrastructure in film by the infamously racist director of Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith; and the debut of the electric Ferris wheel at the Chicago Columbian Exposition (see later). A highlight among these puzzles is Wuebben’s treatment of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. The concept of frontier is masterfully interrogated by historian and geographer Cronon (1991) in his award-winning book Nature’s Metropolis. Turner’s emphasis on triumph over savagery is described by Cronon as an ultimately inadequate and inequitable rendering of American-style progress. Wuebben describes the historical context of Turner’s thesis not as a defense of frontier-based empire during its heyday; instead, Turner makes this presentation at the close of the American frontier. In Chapter 2, Wuebben describes Turner’s first presentation of the idea at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, a spectacle of new electrical technologies. In this context, Turner’s theory is meant to avoid the potential loss of motivating frontier imagery in the American mind. Implicitly, Turner suggests that nature has not been fully tamed through the loss of the frontier and, through the exposition setting, hints that American effort and ingenuity could be applied to electrification as a new frontier. Subsequently, this frontier theme is taken up by electrical superstars like Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla and used broadly to defend technological innovation for much of the twentieth century, a new electronics-based embodiment of empire. Through a constant, just short of overwhelming, stream of historical and theoretical puzzles such as these, Wuebben’s work is both a satisfying read and exceptionally well-grounded in literature geographers hold dear.

The art of Wuebben’s approach lies in a deep treatment of meaning making in literature, history, media, and art, along with focused observation. In short, Wuebben has done the reading and has not skimped on research. For the fractured and fracturing American mind, wired infrastructure is often experienced in spheres unrelated to production of the services they deliver. In this way, it is difficult, Wuebben argues, to avoid a quixotic relationship with these modern (literal and figurative) windmills in that meaning making in industrialized societies occurs in a context in which people are surrounded by systems they do not fully understand. Although infrastructure management and governance are also social, everyday human-scaled experience of wired electric infrastructure is far enough removed that coherence is difficult. In other words, although management systems are at a regional scale and centralized, it is through close personal connections in the home, at school, or among peers on one hand and popular culture on the other that most people perceive communication and power networks, the largest, most connected machine in human history. Wuebben describes a part of this phenomenon in this way: “the increasingly complex and wondrous advantages of electricity were dissociated from the material infrastructure that electrification required” (p. 52). The book maps and evaluates cultural evidence of this splintered experience.

Wuebben presents evidence suggesting a technologically and culturally transformed consciousness in which transportation and information systems are decoupled. Although this process is splintering socially, cognitively, and emotionally, Wuebben highlights a continued awareness of nature and human–environment interactions even as both are increasingly mediated by social institutions and technology. Wuebben pieces together history and contemporary experience, revealing that no individual can be conscious of the fullness of natural, technological, and electrical complexity. Still, throughout the book Wuebben’s data reveals a surprising perception of and deep longing for a full experience of nature through emotional or artistic connection. In many examples the net of commanding wires, although sold to consumers as essential for modern civilization, is rejected when it blocks too much landscape. The tech-saturated American mind consistently sees through totalizing control by expressing resistance in stilted but also surprisingly coherent advocacy efforts to maintain a view or protect land. In this way, while Americans may conceptualize nature as separate and contained on cognitive reserves, as far back as Emerson and Edwards, American art and poetics betray a deeper logic. At times, this logic literally puts an ear to Thoreau’s Aeolian telegraph tower harps, hoping for fractured sonic insight perceived over space and time. At the same time, the American mind feels the loss of New York’s overwhelmed skyline and the almost physically painful sublime of a newly electric Niagara Falls. The breadth and precision of Wuebben’s writing shows these connections even as they are sometimes left less than fully expressed in any one medium or in words.

For geographers, the piece highlights the poetics of electricity, first, robustly for itself through cultural and aesthetic artifact. Wuebben communicates not a novel theory, but a novel application of socially informed humanistic research about an almost infinitely complex human and environmental context where technology escapes both culture and perception and ultimately changes the composition and experience of space. In Chapter 4, Wuebben relates a (NIMBY?) fight against above-ground power line construction in Chino Hills, California. As advocacy groups win the fight to save their view, above-ground resources are wasted and additional funds are spent to underground wires in a system desperate for overhaul and expansion. In this example, Wuebben cares less about picking a side than examining the meaning expressed both by people and, importantly, also latently by their ever-expanding wired infrastructure. As geographers grapple with unbounded but more and more complex space, Wuebben’s style of interdisciplinary research provides a methodological template meant to reflect human consciousness regarding these immense infrastructure assemblages.

Wuebben situates his work firmly in historical American studies, but this research also adds to geographic analysis of infrastructure systems, technology, and nature. The book can be viewed as an application to the electrical grid of the extensive water-as-urban-metabolism literature inspired by critical geographers such as Swyngedouw (2004) in the book Social Power and the Urbanization of Water. In part, Wuebben achieves his research goals through an effortless rural–urban unity, often a struggle in urban political ecology research like Swyngedouw’s. Socially grounded results clarify underlying human connections in which large sociotechnical systems are embedded, although Wuebben makes metabolism explicit only in the conclusion and the work cannot be considered a critical analysis in the broadest sense. However, Power Lined and work like it should be recognized as useful for geography, as Wuebben’s results close analytical gaps between human experience and increasingly powerful networks of things.

British Academy;

Rebecca van Stokkum
Information Center for the Environment, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA.