Contemporary political struggle targets flow because circulation underpins the current order

Evidence

Immediacy is deluge without staunch, a stylized flood of intense immanence in cultural aesthetics that eerily conforms to contemporary conditions of oil swells and aquatic surges. Water out of place is already defining the twenty-first century, and fluid-motion conflicts will only increase. Eighty-four percent of North America’s fresh water sits in the Great Lakes. At the mouth of the largest, Superior (also the world’s largest), protestors have been mobilizing for years to obstruct construction of a pipeline ferrying crude across the watershed under the management of a company with a disastrous track record of spilling millions of gallons of oil into the lakes. Anishinaabe lands are violated by the project; people of the White Earth, Red Lake, and Mille Lacs nations have all sued; the governor of Michigan has revoked the company’s permits. While these routine legal measures do little to stem the tide, activists are mobilizing. A dexterous coalition of Indigenous and environmental protestors in Palisade, Minnesota, blocks the movement of heavy-duty equipment—for the sake of precluding the stream of oil, for the sake of protecting the flow of water, for the sake of the living beings who need it to survive. Sites of such protest are multiplying in the twenty-first century, as elders like Louise Erdrich and scholars like Jeff Insko, Charmaine Chua, and Joshua Clover all note. Masses of bodies align to disrupt the flow of oil, goods, and traffic, from Midwest pipelines to New York’s High Line, shipping ports to airports. This salience of blockades in contemporary political struggle reveals the indispensability of “flow” for the current order of things. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 49

Categorization

• SEED: The blockade-as-political-form observation could ground an essay on how protest tactics mirror (by opposing) the logics of the systems they fight — flow vs. blockage as the defining tactical binary of our era.
• XREF: Useful supplement to the Trees-as-infrastructure article’s concern with infrastructure — pipelines as anti-infrastructure writ against water; the ADDENDUM connection is thematic (bodies as infrastructure blocking).