M

ore than a hundred of us are gathered in an open field, flanked on either side by oil terminals, wind turbines, container cranes. Lance Laoyan, an environmental researcher and sound designer from Rotterdam, leads us along a steep-banked perimeter at which the squatted artists’ encampment of Ruigoord meets Amsterdam’s Petroleumhaven, the largest gasoline port in the world. Here, we are invited to attune our listening to both the infrastructural production of interstitial space and the forms of life that continue to disrupt, endure, or exceed its abstract logics, reckoning with the weight of fossil capital on the littoral ecology of the IJ estuary. Later, back inside, field recordings from beneath the surface of the IJ fill the space of a makeshift lecture hall with the noise of oil tankers, the dense metallic grind of the sea locks, and the unceasing hum of hydraulic pumping stations that maintain surface levels across the Port’s commercial waterways. That evening, Marxist researcher and labor organizer Charmaine Chua hands an ornate lead container to the audience. Raw materials of empire are arranged inside in specimen jars, like a black box of Dutch history and maritime logistics. Heavy scents of crude oil, palm oil, liquid latex fill the room. Punctuating a program of screenings, lectures, and performances coordinated around the theme of Maritime Frictions in 2023, these acute moments of sensory exposure render tangible and legible the sediment of interlocking histories; remainders of colonial extraction, hydraulic engineering, and petrocapitalist accumulation congealed in the form artificial earths, brackish waters, and intransigent refusals. 

This occupied site, Ruigoord, was once an island. Until 1865, when the construction of the North Sea Canal linked the emerging financial capital of Amsterdam with the cargo brought ashore by colonial trade routes, Ruigoord was surrounded by the tidal waters of the IJ bay. The labor-intensive excavation of a shipping channel from the city’s east-facing dockyards to the newly built system of sea locks on the west coast at IJmuiden also moved in lockstep with the drainage of its surrounding waters. This vast hydroengineering project would not only reclaim an expanse of previously submerged ground and saltmarsh for the construction of the current Port of Amsterdam but also radically reshape the saltwater hydrology of North Holland. Once a brackish inlet, the IJ became an infrastructure. Transforming the estuary beyond recognition, the completion of the port and the canal in 1876 also began a continuous process of industrial expansion and economic growth first fueled by the transatlantic slave trade and the import of cocoa, now by oil bunkering and just-in-time production. The names of the docks that encircle the field’s perimeter hardly conceal the coloniality of their position in the development of this transoceanic system of accumulation and circulation: Afrikahaven, Cacaohaven, Petroleumhaven.

In the late 1960s, Ruigoord was consigned to demolition as part of a planned extension of the Afrikahaven to facilitate expanded throughput in the form of coal, petroleum, and natural gas. A coalition of residents, artists, and activists in the squatting movement mobilized against the levelling of homes. The squatting of Ruigoord in 1972 and its subsequent defense against eviction in 1973 is an instance of grit, resolve, friction in the circuitries of maritime capital. At the same time, its existence was made possible in part by the internal contradictions of fossil-fueled accumulation. As the OPEC oil crisis rippled across global financial markets, demand for storage fell and the terminal’s expansion stalled momentarily, offering a marginal aperture in the seemingly relentless growth of the fossil economy. Situated at this specific juncture, the existence of this field is an ongoing refusal of capital’s capacity to subsume and refashion every social and ecological externality it encounters toward the logic of accumulation. Shaped by the antagonistic interplay of fossil energy and brackish hydrology, the port remains a point of ingress and egress, transition and impasse, at which littoral geographies come to thicken and corrode our accounts of logistics space. It was this specific confluence, this encounter between estuarine and infrastructural fields, that first brought us here. 

INFRASTRUCTURAL FIELDWORK

The gathering described above and the essay that follows mark the culmination of two years of fieldwork and practice-based research on the Port of Amsterdam and its surrounding brackish waters. Co-organized with Jeff Diamanti, and in collaboration with the curatorial collective Sonic Acts, the residency program FieldARTS was conceived as an attempt to develop interdisciplinary and artistic research tools for reckoning with this encounter between the ecological and the infrastructural. We wanted to know how salinity and logistics were interpolated through one another on the IJ, and how this material interpolation might place demands on the study of infrastructure. At the same time, the growing prevalence of fieldwork across diverse forms of humanities research with no formal or disciplinary orientation toward the ethnographic or scientific “field” held, for us, the promise of an undisciplined mode of situated practice, responsive to the historical and environmental specificity of the site itself. As a field of study, the ecological effects of the ongoing port expansion at IJmuiden staged an extended encounter between the conceptual promise of infrastructural critique and methodological premise of an open-plan approach to field study. 

Whether Melody Jue’s appeal for a “milieu-specific analysis” (10) in critical ocean studies or Krista Geneviève Lynes’s repurposing of “open-plan fieldwork” (109) for the environmental humanities, this contemporary turn toward the field articulates itself as a coordinated attempt to reconsider and rewrite the boundaries of scientific or anthropological field practices. In their introduction to Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art & Art-Based Research, Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, and Polly Stanton outline a diversity of situated or practice-based methods that fall under the emerging bracket of expanded fieldwork. Performing research in the field, they contend, need not take the fixed form of an analytic apparatus for gathering data. Instead, it might entail the development of practices and methodologies shaped by the material environment in which this work is situated:

Fieldwork is thus a process, a verb – fieldworking. It is a process grounded in and shaped by the site or situation that the artist or research works […] formed and informed by the shifting contexts, dynamics and power relations that affect not only the formation of the field itself but also the researchers within that field. (8-9) 

Rather than a passive background or bank of information, the field itself becomes the subject or even the medium of thought. It is a methodological disposition that resonates closely with Deborah Cowen’s proposition that we take “infrastructure as both an object and a method of inquiry” (2018 471). How, then, might we begin to rethink fieldwork in an infrastructural milieu?

Insofar as this contemporary turn to field practice or “field philosophy” (Buchanan et al. 2018) seeks to draw the material conditions and milieu of research practice into focus, it shares a conceptual premise with the parallel infrastructural turn in the social sciences and humanities. As Adriana Johnson and Daniel Nemser’s “Reading for Infrastructure” argues, by dint of its attachment to “that which undergirds, is within, or is prior to something else,” the prefix infra “also indicates a supposition that it recedes into the background, becoming simply part of the environment” (5-6). To situate our modes of reading at the terminal or the ecotone is then, first and foremost, to refuse this recession from view, shifting infrastructure and field alike from the substratum of critical thought to the subject of critique. More than two decades on from Susan Leigh Star’s “Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999), this figure-ground inversion has cemented itself as something of an axiom for critical infrastructure studies. Following Johnson and Nemser, whose work articulates an ongoing paradigm shift from Star’s foundational reorientation of ethnographic perspective to the more expansive project of an infrastructural aesthetic theory, the aim of FieldARTS has been not only to trace how infrastructure shapes the material field but to develop artistic and practice-based methods for reading that field infrastructurally. 

Taking place in June 2022, the first FieldARTS residency gathered artists, researchers, and writers for a program of intensive field study that took us from the fragile dune systems and brackish inlets of Texel Island, where we were hosted by the NIOZ Institute for Sea Research, to the Port of Amsterdam, where the recent completion of the longest sea lock infrastructure on earth became the focus of our fieldwork. The disciplinary apparatuses and devices applied to the field were plural, ranging from ethnography to performance, cinematographic practice to archival research. Working in the laboratory with marine biologists at NIOZ, participants studied marine life under changing brackish conditions in the IJ while others conducted interviews on labor conditions with seafarers and workers at the port. Fieldworking, following the sense outlined above by Crone, Nightingale, and Stanton, entailed collecting sediment cores, field notes, and hydrophone recordings. Over the last two years the outputs have been equally diverse, incorporating sound installations, film screenings, white papers, labor organizing tools, and a critical glossary, Field Docket (2023). In this article, I outline three lines of inquiry emerging from this extended period of concentrated and collective field study: salinity, logistics, friction. 

SALINITY

To grasp the centrality of salt, both to the critical orientations of FieldARTS and the circulation of commodities through the Port, requires a gloss on brackishness. Scanning the entries of Field Docket, a creative-critical text collectively composed during field excursions to the sea lock, the first entry you encounter is brackish. Not so much a critical glossary as a gathering of critical materials that elude the efforts of a ship’s manifest to index what flows through the port, this collaborative work takes up the maritime connotations of the legal docket only to offer, in its place, a seditious or excessive bill of lading. According to this docket, brackishness comes laden with a multiplicity of meanings. Naming the combination of seawater and freshwater found in estuaries or produced as an effect of coastal hydroengineering it designates, also, the manifold forms of microbial and marine life dependent on these shifting saline gradients. Traceable through brak in Middle-Dutch, meaning “worthless” in the vocabulary of maritime trade, the term is derived originally from the early Germanic brehg: “to break,” or “that which impedes motion” (10). Bearing the historicity of its etymology, brackishness appears suspended between ecological and economic linguistic fields; simultaneously ecotone, waste output, and impediment. 

Occurring at the estuary mouth where the salt tongue meets freshwater outflows, brackishness is not exactly the direct mixing of “salt” and “sweet” water but instead by the constant circulation of different salinity levels. As the river meets the sea the density of this high-salinity inflow pulls the salt inward and downward, lifting freshwater to the surface. Manifest as subsurface turbulence in the estuary, brackishness then names a state of constant and continuous transition (Rockwell Geyer 2019). Generating countless ecoclines across shifting levels of salinity, this state of flux produces some of the planet’s most diverse marine ecosystems (Cardoso 2021). Yet if brackishness is always in transition, it appears in the circulatory systems of maritime shipping as an intransigent material, registered in the calculus of logistical capital as an impediment to profit. From the perspective of the Dutch capitalist and the hydraulic engineer, brackish water is an existential threat. Since the excavation of the North Sea Canal, the drainage of the polders, and the subsequent desalination of the IJsselmeer to the east of Amsterdam, the IJ no longer functions as an estuary (Rot 2022). Instead of freshwater flowing outward to the ocean, the incursion of salinity has threatened to contaminate agricultural groundwater and disrupt supplies of drinking water to the city. This material cost to the IJ’s ecology, in this sense, is also a cost for capital.

At the Port of Amsterdam, brackish water circulates as matter out of place. Keeping pace with the projection of ever-increasing shipping throughput, this hydroengineering project has necessitated the successive construction of ever-growing locks and barriers to hold back the salt. In their video installation and performance lecture “Roadstead, Sea Lock, Deepwater Port,” the research duo Liquid Time trace how the sea locks at IJmuiden have expanded in response to the increasing size of cargo ships, from 1876 to Suezmax to Panamamax. Superimposing the proportions of the Panama and Suez canals onto diverse coastal geographies across the global ocean, the measurements of the deepwater port reproduce what Chua describes as the abstract “spatial arrangements” (2016, 4) of global circulatory infrastructure. In Amsterdam, this seemingly unending growth in oil tanker capacity has culminated in the completion of the longest sea lock in the world: Zeesluis IJmuiden. Arie Vonk, a benthic ecologist who accompanied our field excursion, explained the terminal effects of this hydraulic architecture on marine life in the brackish zone. By stratifying saline gradients, the sea lock disrupts brackish turbulence and circulation. As a result, each time the Zeesluis is used the sudden shock of saltwater proves devastating for freshwater marine environments upstream. As the scale of the port infrastructure has expanded over time, both facilitating and anticipating ever-larger tankers, these ecological costs have increased exponentially. With each opening of this newly finished sea lock, ten million kilos of saltwater accompany the influx of cargo to the IJ.

The scale of the deepwater port is hard to grasp. At once symbolic and mundane, Zeesluis IJmuiden an exemplary object of infrastructural reading. Opened by royal decree in January 2022, the sea lock represents a centuries-long effort of Dutch hydraulic engineering to maintain livable conditions in the lowlands, two thirds of which are situated several meters beneath the North Sea. As a field site or subject of aesthetic attention, though, it continues to refuse critical apprehension. Unassuming to the point of recalcitrance, walking its grassy embankments and concrete docks bears out Star’s famous description of the monotony of infrastructural ethnography as the study of boring objects. At the same time, it refutes her insistence on the abrupt rupture of this “invisible quality of infrastructure” (382) in moments of breakdown. In Natascha Libbert’s photographic index I Went Looking for a Ship (2018), the process of documenting the Port of Amsterdam’s expansion reflects instead how the lock eludes the lens, its submerged depths exceeding the scope of landscape aspect ratio. As a matter of salinity, the environmental cost of circulation exists beyond our field of vision. Even passing through the sea lock from the open water, the sheer scale of Zeesluis IJmuiden’s logistical functionalism and ecological dysfunction remains illegible. Only when listening to hydrophone recordings taken by Laoyan and Charles Rouleaux by casting devices overboard before, during, and after crossing does the sheer volume of this subsurface infrastructure become apprehensible. Recorded underwater, Laoyan and Rouleaux’s compositions register the low thrum of the ship’s motor, the incredible bulk of the sea-lock doors, and the far-off sound of 90,000 liters of brackish water being pumped back into the North Sea each second. 

Listening carefully, the change in resonance effected by the abrupt change in salinity on either side of the crossing becomes apparent as this sharp differentiation of densities maintained by the sea lock appears in the acoustic environment of the installation. A volumetric cut instead of a transition between salt and sweet; an audible imprint of logistical infrastructure. In The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race Affect, Environment, Kelly Mee Rich, Nicole M. Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger locate a conceptual shift in the humanities from making infrastructure visible to making infrastructure legible. Here, rendering legible the impact of the sea lock on the estuary requires practices, devices, and modes of reading that frequently fall beyond the conventional methodological remit of the humanities or social sciences. Might attuning methods to this brackish field require the submergence of our listening; the adoption, in Jue’s terms, of an elemental or milieu-specific methodology for “thinking through the element of seawater” (19)? How, as Macarena Gómez-Barris asks, might we “confuse the normative boundaries of academic study by wading into what lies below the surface of late capitalism?” (12). For Gómez-Barris’s work on hydropower and hydraulic engineering in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies & Decolonial Perspectives, the “submerged perspective” (138) adopted in decolonial film and performance practices offers an essential heuristic for reckoning with the thick opacity of a subsurface environment that capital continuously seeks to operationalize. Likewise, in the brackish waters of the IJ, the work of reading or representing this crosshatching of colonial, ecotonal, and logistical space entails a shift beyond, or beneath, the paradigm of infrastructural invisibility and the ethnographic concept of the field as a bounded site of study. 

LOGISTICS

To listen underneath the surface of the IJ is to realize that this estuarine ecology has come bear the material cost of spatial abstractions attendant on a system of calculation, circulation, and accumulation that would become known, after the 1960s, as the logistics revolution. As Deborah Cowen demonstrates in The Deadly Life of Logistics, the origins of logistics as a totalizing global system are bound up historically in the supersession of break-bulk shipping by the invention of the 40-foot container first contracted for military use by the US company Sea-Land during the Vietnam War. Developed as an intermodal system enabling the rapid movement and transfer of standardized containers between transoceanic shipping routes and inland supply chains, containerization ushered in an era of just-in-time production based on the replicability of this militarized transport system across diverse geographies and economies. If the signature of this logistical spatial arrangement is writ large in the stratified water of the IJ estuary, the material topography of coastal space is also inscribed on the corporate toponomy of this logistical armature. The signature of Sea-Land on these now-ubiquitous shipping containers underscores the extent to which this littoral environment would become, in Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover’s terms, “both literally and metaphorically the ur-ecotone of production and circulation” (307). Faced with falling rates of profit and declining domestic productivity in overdeveloped states, circulation emerged as a new terrain of accumulation. 

Critical histories of logistics usually begin here, with the container. In his now-canonical film The Forgotten Space (2010), Allan Sekula narrates the Port of Rotterdam’s centrality to the global shipping economy through a visual genealogy of containerization in which material commodities and living labor alike are increasingly abjected, automated, or removed from view. In Alberto Toscano’s reading of the film, Sekula’s fixation on the container as a synecdochal figure for logistics registers as an attempt to map or represent an emergent totality; to demystify the concrete abstractions encapsulated by this uniquely traceable, exchangeable, and automatable architecture. At the Port of Amsterdam, however, the planetary capillaries of logistical capitalism appear configured differently, inflected instead by contrapuntal circulations of salt and fossil energy. Where the 1970s saw Rotterdam became a central hub for the import of containerized commodities to Europe, Amsterdam has specialized instead in the transshipment and storage of liquid and dry bulk such as crude oil, construction materials, and coal, generating additional value through the bunkering and blending of petroleum commodities. In place of the container, this estuarine field is marked by oil barges, coal siloes, and terminals of liquefied gas lining the banks of the IJ. Operationalizing and abstracting the transition waters of this fragile ecotone, the port itself imposes a complex system for holding, mixing, or circulating flows of liquid, sediment, and capital. While Zeesluis IJmuiden impedes the exchange of freshwater and saline flows, the terminals that stretch along Petroleumhaven mix crude oil and natural gas into market-ready commodities as valued-added in the planetary movement of fossil energy.

This selective dynamic of circulation and stoppage, diffusion and differentiation, is critical to the infrastructural production of space at IJmuiden. In Capitalism & the Sea, Liam Campling and Alejandro Colas characterize the development of maritime capital as an effort “to transcend the land-sea binary […] attempting in the process to ‘flatten’ the geophysical division between solid ground and fluid water” (3). The intermodal system emergent under the moniker Sea-Land is, of course, exemplary of this effort to eradicate geographical and ecological points of distinction in the service of frictionless circulation. Yet if Sekula’s depiction of Rotterdam in The Forgotten Space encapsulates this system of abstraction, stretching “from the brute materiality of the shipping container to the ethereal whirring of financial circuits,” Spahr and Clover’s account of the continuing centrality of ecotonal differentials offers a more accurate depiction of the IJ estuary as “the meeting point of two ecologies across which value flows” (304, 292). Here, the functioning of the port as a site of transition between transoceanic shipping routes and inland logistics networks is dependent on the continued differentiation of salinity levels in the transitional waters of the estuary. As Spahr and Clover argue, the valorization of capital necessitates “the preservation of these differentials” (303) and positions control rather than the eradication of difference as the compulsive desire of logistical capitalism. As the circulation of capital meets the circulation of saltwater at IJmuiden, we find the contradictions of this system of abstraction, differentiation, and discipline inscribed on the field in concrete form. 

Though Zeesluis IJmuiden has been technically functional since its completion, the sheer volume of saltwater released into the IJ with each tanker that passes through its gates means that it continues to function far below capacity. To maintain an acceptable level of salinity in the estuary, the largest sea lock in the world is hardly operational. Salt, here, is the cause of supply-chain friction. Since opening the lock to allow passage into the Port lays an impossible burden on its hydraulic pumping system, the continued circulation of capital is now dependent on a process of desalination known as Selectieve Ontrekking, or “selective abstraction.” While engineers at the Rijkswaterstaat develop mechanisms for the selective abstraction of saltwater inside the locks, the saline content of this artificial estuary continues to refuse the abstract vision of littoral space as a frictionless plane of maritime mobility. Where the unfettered circulation of capital is materially underwritten by the disruption of hydrological exchange, brackishness appears as a persistent problematic for the transport and transshipment of oil. In other words, the elemental impediment of saltwater is a constant reminder of the genuine ecological costs of circulation (Carter & Diamanti, 2023).

Selective abstraction, as both a process of desalination and a form of cognitive distortion, offers us a critical tool for understanding how logistics both arranges and abstracts the material flows that shape this field. In the policy white paper “Beyond Impasse,” drafted by FieldARTS participants in collaboration with sociologists in the Climate and Fossil Fuels research team at the University of Amsterdam, this centrality of this distortive logic to infrastructural “lock-in” (11) at the Port of Amsterdam is all too clear. Increasingly, the Port envisions itself as a central site of energy transition yet its current strategy for decarbonization depends on an absolute abstraction, at the level of policy, of its material function. While the phase-out of coal is gradually underway, the current target of a carbon neutral port by 2050 disregards entirely the continued and projected throughput of oil and natural gas. In its calculation of carbon impact, the Port of Amsterdam claims no responsibility for what is bunkered, stored, or circulated through its terminals. As you pass Afrikahaven on the offshore tour commissioned by the Port Authority, a pre-recorded guide invites passengers to admire an oil terminal run solely on renewable energy. More than an anomaly in governmental mechanisms of legal culpability, the selective abstractions of transition planning are symptomatic of a fantasy of dematerialized financial flows fed by maritime logistics. If, as Chua has argued, logistical capitalism envisages a system of frictionless movement in which “human and nonhuman lives are rendered subordinate to the imperative of smooth, efficient circulation” (2018, 622), then attending to the material throughput and waste outputs of port infrastructures reveals the violent process of abstraction on which this vision of logistical accumulation depends. 

In a bulletin circulated by the labor organizing platform Transnational Social Strike, this “selective visibility” is identified as a central tenet of logistical organization. “The imaginary of efficiency, smoothness and technological necessity connected to the so-called ‘logistics revolution’ is only part of the story,” they write, “to struggle in and against this world implies the task of unveiling the conditions laying behind this supposedly technical logistical transformation, bringing to light what logistics systematically makes invisible” (6). This proposition is, of course, strikingly close to Star’s inversion thesis. Returning to Johnson and Nemser’s “Reading for Infrastructure,” however, this tension between the apparent intransigence of impasse and the increasingly evident precarity of fossil capital’s machinery also reflects a structuring dynamic for infrastructural critique: 

How might one notice, on the one hand, the forms of inertia set in motion by infrastructures — the work and weight of maintaining a certain status quo, that which they make happen or keep from happening — and, on the other, the forms of leakiness and ruination that nonetheless permeate these infrastructural systems? (7) 

Where the seemingly terminal inertia of carbon lock-in encounters the material impediment of brackish turbulence, the Port of Amsterdam encapsulates this dialectic of permanency and instability. If, as Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta have suggested, the horizon of “infrastructural breakdown saturates a particular politics of the present” (2018, 3), then attending to this encounter between salinity and logistics reveals a hidden friction in the circuitry of maritime capitalism. At IJmuiden, where capital encounters and encloses the subsurface turbulence of the estuary, brackishness appears as an ecological disjuncture in which the material contradictions of transition policy and the real abstractions of logistical value are rendered startingly concrete.

FRICTION

Laleh Khalili’s critical history of shipping, Sinews of War & Trade, emphasizes how supply-chain management hinges on the elimination of all social and ecological impediments to circulation, encountering dockyard strikes and silting deltas as just so many instances of “value-chain friction” (97). From the perspective of logistical capitalism, such blockages are routinely seen as opportunities for optimization. Viewed “from below,” however, they are often moments of vulnerability or leverage (Fox-Hoddess, 105). Yet if capital views political and ecological resistance as homologous or even homogenous impediments to motion, how do we respond to or resist this kind of flattening equivalence? As a metaphor for thinking across infrastructural interventions, the heuristic of “maritime friction” – in which the political intransigence of solidarity actions is cast against the elemental problematic of salinity – risks reproducing a logic of abstraction attendant on logistical circulation. At once material and figurative, this metaphoricity hazards a certain slippage between the ecological contingencies of infrastructure and the collective capacity of the strike or the blockade. 

In her afterword to The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure, Jennifer Wenzel ruminates on the limits of reading sociotechnical systems through the frame of infrastructural aesthetics. Taken up primarily as metaphor, she suggests, the structural obstacles and tactical openings presented by the breakdown of energy systems or logistical networks can only recede from critical grasp, shifting from the concrete to the abstract. Yet at the same time, she concludes, reading for infrastructure also holds the promise of returning aesthetic theory to “the concept-grounding power of the material” (210). Returning from our field trip to Ruigoord and Zeesluis IJmuiden, Chua posed a similar question about the metaphorization of infrastructure. Or rather, about the tendency of recent work in the humanities to retreat to the figurative in order to navigate its encounters with the political economy and ecology of logistics. This question – elaborated in Wenzel’s skepticism over how “the concerns and assumptions of one field translate to the other” (203) – foregrounds a productive tension for the project of situating or submerging the critique of logistical capitalism. How do we navigate disciplinary frictions between practice research, open-plan fieldwork, and materialist critique? And how might working through this encounter between brackish ecologies and port infrastructures offer tools for thinking across the immanent contradictions and antagonisms of maritime capital?

Infrastructure enters Marxist thought as both a minor mistranslation and material condition for capital’s expanded reproduction. First used by French engineers in the nineteenth century to describe that which lay below or before the railway lines and civic architectures of industrial accumulation and colonial dispossession, it is a word knit from the capillaries of empire that would later come to separate, in Francophone translations of Marx, the concrete means of capital’s reproduction from the social forms reproduced in superstructural relation to this substratum. In an orthodox Marxist idiom, the term often appears interchangeable with “economic base,” designating that which subtends any social superstructure. Yet the word remains somehow in excess of its less-charismatic synonym, straining at the limits of political economy. For Louis Althusser, thinking infrastructurally about the social whole of capital had analytic purchase not in spite of, but precisely because of, this metaphorical excess. Infrastructure appeals as “spatial metaphor: the metaphor of a topography” (134). “Like every metaphor,” he writes, “this metaphor suggests something, makes something visible” (134-135). In The Promise of Infrastructure, Appel, Anand, and Gupta find Althusser’s use of the word both too liberally metaphorical and too deterministically literal. I want to suggest, though, that the appearance of infrastructure-as-figure tells us something more about infrastructural reading than the adoption or rejection of Althusserian ideology critique might allow. Rather than being reducible to “base,” infrastructure appears as something akin to a mediating third term for the material process by which abstract and objective relations of exchange come to manifest as lived experience or social form, patterned or repeated across resistant ecologies and worlds.

Instead of simply making visible structures that are submerged or systematically sunk from view, reading for infrastructure renders legible the complex, nonlinear, and recursive determination of social life by the material structures that lie beneath, behind, or in-between. For a tradition of Marxist aesthetic theory that has proved formative for both Wenzel and Toscano, reading practices that reveal this “subterranean infrastructural process” (Jameson, 239) have offered a means of attending to objective relations that otherwise exceed figuration; to a substrate occluded by the real abstractions of capital. In response to Chua’s question, then, I am interested in elaborating how these infrastructural encounters in the estuarine field, as both an ecotonal boundary and spatial metaphor, might render legible submergent friction in the socioecological totality that we have come to call logistics; how topographic metaphor has always been embedded in materialist accounts of transition and struggle; and how salt and sediment have written themselves into figurations of counter-logistical resistance. 

Speaking in 1856, just a few years before the excavation and canalization of the IJ estuary, Karl Marx described the rise of industrial capitalism by recourse to a striking geologic metaphor in which technological transitions and social revolts of the mid-nineteenth century appeared as “cracks and fissures” betraying “oceans of liquid matter” that lay beneath the surface. By 1906, Rosa Luxemburg’s strategic tract The Mass Strike appeared fully immersed in the turbulence of this subsurface milieu. Here, what Luxemburg describes as the “elemental power” of the general strike in pre-Soviet Russia appears as a turbulent hydrological force. First estuarine, then oceanic:

It flows now like a broad billow […] and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, […] run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. (32)

Describing the mass insurrection that spread in 1905 from the oil refineries of Baku to the dockyards of Odessa, testing the strategic vulnerability of oil extraction and shipping routes, Luxemburg insisted that the eventual decline and retreat of this action would nonetheless lay groundwork for struggles to come. “After every foaming wave of political action,” she writes, “a fructifying deposit [befruchtender Niederschlag] remains behind” (32). 

In German, Niederschlag implies an entire gamut of hydrological phenomena stretching from condensation to rainfall. Luxemburg’s usage, however, directs our attention away from “precipitation” and toward “precipitate.” In other words, to the separation and accrual of sediments from a state of liquid suspension. Taking on a certain financial resonance in translation, Luxemburg’s fructifying deposit then appears dialectically suspended between capitalist accumulation and material residuum. Envisaging the ebb and flow of collective resistance as the suspension and sedimentation of both capital and grit, I want to suggest that Luxemburg’s “fructifying deposit” might be a way of reckoning with both the political horizons of maritime friction and the historicity of the field at Ruigoord from which this essay first departed. Holding together residuum, resource, and resolve, Luxemburg’s twin figures of estuarine turbulence and precipitate become “tools that allow us to think infrastructure’s metaphorical capacities with its material forms” (Appel, Anand, & Gupta 2015). 

As Johnson and Nemser suggest, Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913) is remarkable for its reading of the coloniality of infrastructure and its description of railway lines, trading ports, and ocean liners as apparatuses of infrastructural domination and dispossession. Written a decade prior, The Mass Strike furnishes an emergent estuarine idiom through which to grasp the port and the terminal as both a field of hydrological flows and a terrain of struggle. Here, the effect of figuring the strike as an estuary is not only to draw strategic attention to this littoral terrain but also to evoke the latent possibility of friction immanent to the composition of maritime capital and logistics work. This nascent vision of the supply-chain strike, stretching across emergent infrastructures of industrial production and circulation from the shipyard to the oil terminal, remains instructive for contemporary organizing across the multiple sites and subjects stitched together by the threads of global shipping. If the increasing centrality of circulation struggles is well-established in contemporary theorizations of counter-logistics and choke points (Chua & Bosworth 2023; Clover & Spahr 2019), then the resurgence of port blockades across the recent wave of general strikes has further underscored the “residual” strategic efficacy of workers in shipping and logistics (Toscano 2011, np). From oil workers on the Persian Gulf downing tools in solidarity with the Iranian feminist insurrection, the coordinated labor shutdowns that closed ports in solidarity with the George Floyd uprising, or current attempts to disrupt the supply of arms and fuel to Israeli’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the figure of the mass strike has forced its way onto the political horizon once more. In the words of Transnational Social Strike, the maritime supply chain is at once “a tool of political communication, a field of organization, a chance of mass insubordination” (12). 

Note: This work is indebted to conversations and collaborative thinking with Jeff Diamanti, Charmaine Chua, and the entire FieldARTS collective. 

References

Althusser, Louis. (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation). In: Louis Althusser Lenin & Philosophy. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York & London: Monthly Review Press, pp. 127-186. 

Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand, & Akhil Gupta (2015) The Infrastructure Toolbox. Society for Cultural Anthropology, September 24. Available at https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-the-infrastructure-toolbox.

Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand, & Akhil Gupta (2018) Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure. In: Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, & Akhil Gupta (eds) The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 1-40. 

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Fred Carter is a researcher at the University of Glasgow, where he is director of the residency FieldARTS and core member of the Infrastructure Humanities Group.

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