Technologies as Rubble? Destabilizing Narratives of Progress I

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Many imagined that globalization would advance uninterrupted, thanks to new technologies, and would bring capitalist development to billions worldwide. To disrupt such technological determinism and reassess ongoing dynamics of global production/destruction, we propose to examine disused, abandoned, broken or obsolete technologies as “rubble” — as affective objects that continue to influence society and politics after their allure or usefulness has waned. Analytically, this means examining how such objects persist in affecting people differentially across social, geographical and cultural positions (cf. forthcoming issue of the Journal of Political Ecology). We borrow the concept from Gaston Gordillo. In Rubble (2014), Gordillo views the destruction caused by economic globalization not as ahistorical ‘debris’ nor ruins celebrated as evidence of progress, but as rubble embedded in cycles of production/destruction revealing how past injustices are lived in the present. For this open panel, we invite contributions that explore technologies as “rubble.” Among other questions, participants might ask how such an approach modifies narratives of “failed” or “delayed” development or imaginaries of renewal, invention, and global competitiveness; how to recognize technological rubble, or apply the term to technologies in use; how technologies succumb to political and social change, not just technological advance, yet can continue to have political power in their “afterlife”; how inequalities and injustices become justified within narratives of technical rationality and sophistication; or how seeing technologies as rubble highlights their means of enduring in a given context, a quality sometimes overlooked in analyses of technological circulation across time and place.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Javiera Barandiaran, University of California, Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• Does the Rubble of SuperPhenix Shelter or Cast a Shadow on Astrid’s Cradle ? - Martin Denoun, GSPR/EHESS

• Experimenting With Rubble in Agro-Industrial Amazonia - David Rojas, Bucknell University

• Our Solar Debris - Jamie Cross, University of Edinburgh

• The Affective Presence of Abandoned Technologies: Clouds, Cannons and Community Struggle in Highland Ecuador - Tristan Partridge, UCSB, Anthropology