(Non-)Reciprocities: Relations of and Against Extraction

• In Event: Towards a Typology of Relations

Abstract

This paper approaches the (non)reciprocal as a relation that both animates extraction as a settler colonial technology and offers a kind of infrastructure for moving beyond it. In doing so, the paper offers to STS a critical vocabulary for confronting the unevenly experienced risks and rewards of extraction, and for developing pathways that nurture good relations against extractive ones. Non-reciprocity is a constitutive characteristic of extractive relations and their ideological expression of extractivism. Naomi Klein’s frequently cited definition of extractivism, for instance, places the nonreciprocal at the heart of its impetus. “Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking,” Klein (2014) writes, “It is the reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own.” Nonreciprocal relations, then, are those which animate extraction, an expression of what Jennifer Wenzel (2020) calls “resource logics,” or ways of making sense of and acting in the world that objectifies relations in the terms that Klein lays out. Putting pressure on the nonreciprocal draws attention to the ways in which the burdens of extraction—its risks—are shouldered most heavily by the peoples and ecosystems that seek to maintain reciprocal relations. Addressing extractive infrastructures as media, this paper employs the (non-)reciprocal as an avenue through which to negotiate historical (Malm 2016), new (Yusoff 2019), and Indigenous (Todd 2017; Spice 2018) materialist approaches to infrastructure and through this negotiation it proposes a method of (non)reciprocity against extraction.

Author

• Jordan B. Kinder, McGill University