Indistinguishable from magic? Extractivism, infrastructure, and the obfuscation of consequences
Channel: Paul Graham Raven
Date: 2020-06-28

This is a video-paper made for the Tracing the Veins 2020 virtual conference, staged by the Political Ecology Research Center at Massey University, New Zealand, and Wageningen university, The Netherlands, in late June and early July 2020.

The aim of this paper is to introduce a speculative material politics of extractivism. This starts from the a theoretical claim that that infrastructural systems inevitably collude in a process of self-obfuscation. The purpose of this position is to support an argument that any attempt to address the influence and impact of extractivism must include and address an account of the obfuscatory logics of the systems through which extraction is performed.