Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Anthropogenic Rivers The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower Jerome Whitington E X P E R T I S E : C U LT U R E S A N D T E C H N O L O G I E S O F K N O W L E D G E $29.95 | 282 pages | Paperback In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, “sustainable” hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated ‘hactivism.’ Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas ‘anthropogenic’ usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also imply new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a “historical ontology of ourselves,” Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures. Jerome Whitington is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. “Jerome Whitington’s book deserves a wide-ranging readership, from those interested in expertise and epistemology or in transnational neoliberalism, to those who care about environmental politics and ecologies.” —Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto “This carefully crafted ethnography considers the imaginative dimension of these collaborations. Rather than a polarizing account of a conflict, Whitington gently probes the risks, potentials, and uncertainties of a major engineering project.” —Eben Kirksley, Deakin University “Whitington zeros in on the performative social skills of charismatic leadership, finely tuned report writing, and constant motivation with feel-good metrics of minor accomplishments, fragilely trying to instill new subjectivities if not better lives.” — Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology in the Meantime SAVE 30% • USE CODE 09FLYER • In the United States order online at cornellpress.cornell.edu or call 800 848 6224 • In Canada email info@codasat.com • In the UK, Europe, Asia, Middle East, & Africa save 30% on website orders at combinedacademic.co.uk Use discount code CS09FLYER • In Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, & Papua New Guinea order online at footprint.com.au 

Anthropogenic Rivers The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower By Jerome Whitington Cornell University Ithaca and London 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 3 —-1 —0 —+1 06/05/18 12:51 PM Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Production of Uncertainty 1 INTERLUDE. ON THE POSTCOLONY (ENGINEERING) 1. Hydropower’s Circle of Influence 34 INTERLUDE. WHAT IS A DAM? 2. Vulnerable at Every Joint 74 INTERLUDE. INTIMACY (VETTING) 3. Performance-Based Management 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 7 115 —-1 —0 —+1 06/05/18 12:51 PM v iii Contents INTERLUDE. THE METHOD OF UNCERTAINTY 4. The Ethics of Document Engineering 153 INTERLUDE. INTERVIEW NOTES (LIGHTLY EDITED) 5. Anthropogenic Rivers 183 Conclusion: Figuring the Anthropogenic 220 Notes 229 Bibliography 241 Index 000 -1— 0— +1— 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 8 06/05/18 12:51 PM Preface Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower is premised on the observation that ecology has become central to the status of anthropos in the contemporary.1 While this problematique has been a long time in coming, it is now clear that there is a decisive, transnational interest in examining the significance of human-induced ecological change within popular culture, political movements, governments, and even business. Essential to this emergence has been a shift from the comparatively discourse-centric risk politics of the 1980s and 1990s to what we can call an ontological politics of uncertainty. Risk politics hinged on an epistemological dilemma and was preoccupied with how to make socially valid decisions when safety could not be guaranteed. It also appeared strikingly Eurocentric because it maintained belief in rational decision making and state guarantees of safety, while retreating into the sense of security offered by experts. Even in the United States, risk politics frequently took the form of perception management (the Tylenol poisonings), pop culture (apocalypse; Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise), or outright environmental injustice 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 9 —-1 —0 —+1 06/05/18 12:51 PM x -1— 0— +1— Preface (chemical alley; Hurricane Katrina)—not the formal problem of a technocratic rationalism that could no longer trust in the ideology of value-neutral truth claims. For marginalized communities around the world, the expectation that policy decisions would guarantee their safety seemed like a bizarre premise to begin with. By contrast, the ontological politics of uncertainty is characterized by powerful actors who strategically produce uncertainty (for instance, by undermining scientific truth claims); by deep-seated disinvestment in knowledge infrastructures; by uncertainty as “built in” to ecological relations themselves (rather than as only a discursive or epistemic problem); and by the destabilized temporalities of anthropogenic natures, infrastructures, and knowledges (in which people are obliged to speculate on dangerous futures or attend to the latent effects of the industrial past). Among other things, uncertainty is the domain of opportunistic commercial actors who protect themselves against threats while taking advantage of risky possibilities— oftentimes producing yet more instability in the process. Uncertainty is the result of a capitalist valorization of long-odds achievement that does not care very much about theoretical justifications for action and is premised on the logic that demonstrated achievement, not correct representations of reality, is the only real proof of the worth of an idea. With deep resonances with American pragmatist philosophy, it is a radically different orientation than that of a rationalism that hides value judgments behind authoritative scientific claims. The contention of this book is that late industrial environments are constituted by an ontology of uncertainty in which actual ecological relations become deeply uncertain, and that this condition is essential for debates about the status of the human vis-à-vis global ecologies. By exploring this extensive “production of uncertainty,” I show that the anthropogenic relation should be construed as a double movement. Typically, the term “anthropogenic” refers to human-induced ecological change and raises questions about culpability and the distribution of harm within human and nonhuman ecological relations. But much contemporary practice in fact explores the creative potential of destabilized ecologies and asks how new capacities for being are emergent within pervasive ecological change. This view, which is different from the positivist, determinist anthropology of Jared Diamond–style reflection on our ecological predicament, implicitly posits that the human is not defined as a moral entity or 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 10 06/05/18 12:51 PM Preface xi biological species, but rather as a work in progress in a condition of permanent emergence within tense and fraught ecological relations. If we understand “the human” not as a transcendental subject or as a species defined by universal characteristics, but as an emergent work in progress, then the anthropological question shifts from “what does it mean to be human?” toward something more like “what are people capable of?.” What distinctive human formations are possible now or in the future? This question is necessarily speculative, for it is only as a matter of inventive engagement that it is possible to venture an answer. “The endeavor,” writes Anand Pandian (n.d.) is “to conceive a humanity yet to come.” Moreover, it insists that the capacity to inflict and bear harm should be included within anthropologists’ theorization of the human, just as much as, say, cutting edge science (e.g., Rose 2007). Hence, unlike debates about the Anthropocene, a metanarrative that appears inevitably foreclosed and committed to an unworkable notion of civilization (see esp. Scranton 2015; Oreskes 2014), I venture to suggest that radical ecological change posits the necessity of open-ended experimentation on the human, fraught with the risk of failure, and that such experimentation at the level of practice is in fact what is taking place. Anthropos is the dependent variable in an unknown techno-ecological function. Witness troubling geoengineering experiments currently underway or Elon Musk’s commitment to climate change entrepreneurialism and Mars colonization. Those are not the only kinds of experiments possible, but the fact remains that we Earthlings, human and otherwise, simply do not know who we are going to become. To address these ideas, why turn to a relatively obscure sustainability experiment in the borderlands of Southeast Asia? The immediate context of the research was an experimental collaboration between a major hydropower company operating in Laos—probably the most profitable company in the country at the time—and a well-known transnational activist group, International Rivers. What made this collaboration distinctive was that it was an overwrought political situation and yet, on the other hand, it was also a genuine experimental collaboration in which people were taking real risks and attempting to concoct new kinds of formations. This was true also of the villagers, farmers, and fisher-people who were coming to terms with major livelihood transformation and the experimental sustainability designs of the private-sector hydropower company. Moreover, at that time (in the mid-2000s), Laos was itself the subject of experimentation on large-scale 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 11 —-1 —0 —+1 06/05/18 12:51 PM x ii -1— 0— +1— Preface hydropower design and financing. In short, this was a situation in which diverse groups of people were working to accommodate anthropogenic rivers into their practices and dispositions in novel ways. If Lao rivers were becoming newly anthropogenic, so too were people and their diverse institutions “becoming riparian” in the sense that their experimental practices sought to accommodate the river in new and committed ways. Many of the current debates surrounding ecology address the global, and they do so in terms that evoke a similar “global” generality. By contrast, it is important to remember that ecological subjectivation frequently takes place at the level of comparatively mundane practices, and it often has little to do with ecological conscious-raising or ethical ideals about protecting the earth. The fact that there is so much of this mundane subjectivation, taking such extreme, plural and specific forms, is the challenge before us—not the creation of a global metadiscourse. If the objective is “to think what we are doing” (Arendt 1998, 5) or, more expansively, to explore a “historical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault 1997c 315), then perhaps it is worthwhile to look at a case in which the people involved were themselves experimenting, challenging their own political commitments, and thinking aloud about what they were doing and why. The result, therefore, is an attempt to develop tools and problems (Rabinow 2003, 2008), rather than a theory or narrative of allencompassing change. Finally, the part of my approach that I think will prove most jarring to academic readers is the attempt to think about the contingencies of late industrial environments through the ontological terms posed by capitalist actors themselves. “Uncertainty”—as a domain of practice, as a way of looking at the world, and as an affirmation of open-ended contingency—is essential to the materialist ontology of managers, technicians, and experts, and this book can be taken as an attempt to “ontologize up” rather than to take for granted the “Great Divide” (Latour 1987) that is frequently invoked to debunk claims of authoritative certainty. Martin Holbraad, Morten Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro might put it thus, when they write that the challenge is “to pass through what we study . . . releasing shapes and forces that offer access to what might be called the dark side of things” (2014). I offer an experiment in postnatural grounded theory much in the way that the term “postcolonial” refers not to the end of colonialism but to the pervasive inheritances of colonialism after its formal end. To this extent, I am less interested in a theoretical critique of the concept of nature and 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 12 06/05/18 12:51 PM Preface x iii more interested in the experimental elaboration of postnatural ecologies. Capitalists, after all, are materio-semiologists par excellence, and the Foucauldians and actor network theorists have been silenced, or at least forced to retreat into the safety of knowledge institutions, in the face of current political events. I only ask, in a very classical anthropological gesture, that the reader inhabit this position for a while in order to understand what it feels like.2 Postnatural ecologies look quite different from this vantage— more open-ended, less concerned with authoritative knowledge that we might presume, superficially more optimistic, and also quite a bit darker. At a moment when we are called on to vouch for the authority of environmental sciences and institutions in the face of a full-scale capitalist assault on environmental knowledge, I hope this ethnography will serve as a detailed look into one capitalist modality of power/knowledge and its ontological implications. A note on sources and anonymity: all ethnographic informants in this book are treated anonymously, with two exceptions: Ian Baird and Bruce Shoemaker, two scholar activists who played a role in the events I describe, agreed to be identified in the text. Village names were changed, but the names of companies and NGOs are left intact. All quotations should be considered paraphrased from longhand notes. —-1 —0 —+1 552-73915_ch00_1P.indd 13 06/05/18 12:51 PM Notes Preface 1. This way of formulating the question comes from Rabinow 2003, 2008. See also Rees, forthcoming, After Ethnos; Pandian, forthcoming, A Possible Anthropology; and Murphy (2008, 696): “In the twenty-first century, humans are chemically transformed beings.” 2. As I suggest below, the book can be read against the grain as an anthropology of white masculinity in postcolonial context; also, nearly all of the anthropology of these kinds of capitalist practices that I have found useful comes from feminist authors: Ong 1987, Fortun 2001, Murphy 2006 (a historian), Martin 1994, and Strathern 1992. Introduction 1. Unindexed recording in author’s possession, dated July 26, 2004. Note on names and anonymity: all ethnographic informants in this book are treated anonymously, with two exceptions: Ian Baird and Bruce Shoemaker, two scholar activists who played a role in the events I describe, agreed to be identified in the text. Village names were changed, but the names of companies and NGOs are left intact. All quotations should be considered paraphrased from longhand notes. 552-73915_ch01_1P.indd 229 —-1 —0 —+1 06/05/18 12:51 PM