How "drowned town" literature, road movies, energy landscape
photography, and "death train" narratives represent the brutality of
industrial infrastructures.
In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure
not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps
capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of
despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this "infrastructural
brutalism"--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus
of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture
but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological
brutality of industrial infrastructures.
Truscello explores the necropolitics of infrastructure--how
infrastructure determines who may live and who must die--through the
lens of artistic media. He examines the white settler nostalgia of
"drowned town" fiction written after the Tennessee Valley Authority
flooded rural areas for hydroelectric projects; argues that the road
movie represents a struggle with liberal governmentality; considers the
ruins of oil capitalism, as seen in photographic landscapes of
postindustrial waste; and offers an account of "death train narratives"
ranging from the history of the Holocaust to postapocalyptic fiction.
Finally, he calls for "brisantic politics," a culture of unmaking that
is capable of slowing the advance of capitalist suicide. "Brisance"
refers to the shattering effect of an explosive, but Truscello uses the
term to signal a variety of practices for defeating infrastructural
power. Brisantic politics, he warns, would require a reorientation of
radical politics toward infrastructure, sabotage, and cascading
destruction in an interconnected world.
