Extraction’s writing shifts from mapping earth to policing workers.

Evidence

At the oasis, the Americans had asked few questions; what fascinated them—what demanded writing up—was the earth below, not the people above. But the Bedouins relocated to the urban wilderness of the company town find that the Americans have now turned into big-time questioners: after long interrogations each worker is inscribed into the system, shadowed by a paper trail identity. The bewitchments of writing now include the signature and the identity card: writing has become fundamental to petro-modernity’s control of labor and to the administration of difference enforced by a surveillance-cum-carceral culture. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Soundscape thread on how chronic surveillance/ordering dulls autonomous life, and to the Along-the-Archival-Grain material on writing as imperial technology.