Writing up a place serves as proto-violence that writes it off.

Evidence

The power that a geological survey embodies may, of course, be used for positive or destructive ends. But here the implication is that in being written up, the place (and all the life forms that depend on it) is being written off. The prospectors’ writing may be petro-capitalism’s first act of protoviolence, but it does not constitute a first mapping of the wadi; rather we can read their industrious writing as superimposing an “official landscape” onto a “vernacular landscape.” And thus the Americans will soon designate three oil camps outside Harran H1, H2, and H3: the stark, affectless numerical counting, posing as rationality, discounts and overwrites the existing place names and the histories that animate them. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 267

Categorization

• XREF: The official-landscape-over-vernacular-landscape distinction echoes ch4’s environmental conflict over mapping and the Grafting essay’s naming-as-infrastructure thread. — connects to: Representational acts that belittle are themselves a form of violence. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1820; Representation destroys the place it celebrates more than violence does — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 146; Tourist Eden fantasy obscures the violence that created a place — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 764
• SEED: The ‘writing up = writing off’ pun, hatched through survey-as-protoviolence, is a compelling figure for an essay on how data/measurement disciplines dispossess.

Broader Connections

• Representational acts that belittle are themselves a form of violence. #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1820
• Representation destroys the place it celebrates more than violence does #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 146