Infrastructural Brutalism

<b>How drowned town literature road movies energy landscape photography and death train narratives represent the brutality of industrial infrastructures.</b><p>In this book Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair toxicity and death. Truscello terms this infrastructural brutalism--a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological political and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures. </p><p>Truscello explores the necropolitics of infrastructure--how infrastructure determines who may live and who must die--through the lens of artistic media. He examines the white settler nostalgia of drowned town fiction written after the Tennessee Valley Authority flooded rural areas for hydroelectric projects; argues that the road movie represents a struggle with liberal governmentality; considers the ruins of oil capitalism as seen in photographic landscapes of postindustrial waste; and offers an account of death train narratives ranging from the history of the Holocaust to postapocalyptic fiction. Finally he calls for brisantic politics a culture of unmaking that is capable of slowing the advance of capitalist suicide. Brisance refers to the shattering effect of an explosive but Truscello uses the term to signal a variety of practices for defeating infrastructural power. Brisantic politics he warns would require a reorientation of radical politics toward infrastructure sabotage and cascading destruction in an interconnected world.</p>