Hannah Appel

Walls and white elephants: Oil extraction, responsibility, and infrastructural violence in Equatorial Guinea

Starting from the juxtaposition of Equatorial Guinea’s luxurious private oil compounds with the sporadic and uneven public infrastructure outside their walls, this article explores how infrastructure becomes a key site through which oil and gas companies and Equatoguinean actors negotiate entanglement and disentanglement, responsibility and its abdication. If basic forms of infrastructural violence include exclusion and disconnection, that violence is redoubled by the work of disentanglement–the work to abdicate responsibility for those forms of violence. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, as well as on the work of Michel Callon and Koray Çaliskan, this article describes how the work-intensive disentanglement evidenced in the enclaves operates on behalf of the marketization of oil and gas. Marketization is made possible through work to deny the web of sociopolitical relations required for hydrocarbon extraction and production, thus allowing the commodity (and the companies producing it) to appear as if separate from the broader social context within which they operate. At the same time, however, this work to deny certain social relations inevitably requires the production and internalization of others, often materialized through the production and manipulation of infrastructure.

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

Finance, Figuration, and the Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street

If the imaginative project of capitalism comes to life through processes of figuration, it is the white male figure of the banker, the trader, or the broker who lends imaginative cohesion to what we might otherwise consider a diverse set of practices and people scattered unevenly across landscapes. However, as both Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have argued, attention to figuration can also expand the fields of possibility, allowing us to reimagine both pasts and futures of finance. This article thinks through finance and figuration with the Alternative Banking Group of Occupy Wall Street. Focusing on Cathy O’Neil—a former hedge fund “quant”— the article follows the significance of gender and other habitations of subjectivity for finance insiders-turned-activists. Attention to Alt Banking participants demonstrates the unpredictability of the actors and forms of expertise we have come to associate with capitalism’s contemporary center, and traces the repurposing of their expertise from the private pursuit of profit to the intersubjective pursuit of democratized finance.

Finance is just another word for other people's debts an interview with David Graeber

In this interview David Graeber discusses the radical politics of his childhood, his own political trajectory through the globalization movement, and how Occupy Wall Street both emerged and departed from that genealogy. Turning to questions of intensifying financialization in recent years, Graeber takes analysts to task for not understanding the relationship between private debt and finance - that far from making value out of nothing, finance has been making value out of the income and debt streams of working- and middle-class people. As he traces his own intellectual ancestry from Marx to Mauss to economic anthropologist Keith Hart, Graeber also shares his vision of the present moment, in which the cancellation of private debts in some form seems inevitable and the democratization of finance and the money-creation system, increasingly possible.

The idea life of money and poststructural realism

Comment on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.