Infrastructural Dismantlings: On Harm and Repair in Polyphonic Assemblages

In their Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, Anna Lowenthal Tsing and her collaborators argue that imperial and industrial infrastructures should be singled out for their “exceptional force in changing the earth’s surface,” and, moreover, that in the face of the dangers presented by this terraforming, “dismantling huge swaths of these imperial and industrial infrastructures might be our best chance for sustaining more-than-human liveability.” With this, they join a growing chorus proclaiming that when it comes to sustainable futures, taking things apart may be as important as building things anew.

Rather than embrace or reject dismantling-as-solution, this paper explores what is revealed about imperial infrastructures, and, in turn, about blurry thresholds between harm and repair, in efforts by environmental activists to remove environmental infrastructures on the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Proceeding through a series of interwoven stories that explore, in turn, enactments of the “prior” in a hydrology lab; the emergent biopolitics of a lock and dam; inscriptions and erasures of settler cosmotechnics; toxic ecologies of repair; and the geologics of (white) property, I argue for an ethics and politics of dismantling attuned to the diverse, entangled, and decidedly non-teleological spatial and temporal rhythms of environment-infrastructure.