Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure

by Michael Truscello

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262358729
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Series:	Infrastructures
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Michael Truscello is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and General Education at Mount Royal University, Calgary.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii 
Introduction: The Paver of Modern Life 1 
1 Drowned Town Fiction: The Intimate Poetics of Large Dams and Settler Common Sense 41 
2 The Materiality of the Road in the “Road Movie” 117 
3 Agency and Energy Regimes in Ruins: The Photography of Oil Landscapes 149 
4 Death Train Narratives 193 
Conclusion: Infrastructural Brutalism and Brisantic Politics 227 
Notes 267 
Bibliography 327 
Index 361

Editorial Reviews

"From the sea of books that are published each year, every once in a while something truly brilliant washes ashore and radically changes the way we think about the world. Infrastructural Brutalism is one of those books. Truscello has produced a visionary critique of infrastructure, positioning it not as mere connection or capillary, but as a noxious reflection of the cruelty of capitalism and the dissonance, despair, and death that it delivers."
– Simon Springer, Professor of Human Geography, Univeresity of Newcastle, Australia; author of The Anarchist Roots of Geography and Violent Neoliberalism

"Capital wills itself to become infrastructure. Yet industrial capitalism now strangles life to the extent that we become weedy survivors in the cracks of its cementscape. Truscello’s fascinating study probes the death drive of contemporary capital though its necroaesthetics while summoning a politics that could rupture this suicidal trajectory."
– Dominic Boyer, Professor, Rice University; author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene

"Infrastructural Brutalism is a provocative and radical contribution to contemporary infrastructure studies. Truscello’s work here is erudite, inventive, and politically charged. My scholar’s brain is buzzing, and my activist’s heart is pumping."
– Darin Barney, Grierson Chair in Communication Studies, McGill University; author of The Network Society

“There are only a handful of books in our preciously short lives that force us to re-evaluate and reimagine the world around us in fundamental ways and our role(s) within it. For me, Infrastructural Brutalism will be one of those books, and I have every confidence that such a transformative relationship will be shared by many others.”
—Richard J. White, Reader in Human Geography, Sheffield Hallam University

From the Publisher