Water: Political,biopolitical,material

The materiality of water (I): Water as political

Flowing through the hydrological cycle, water links individual bodies to one another through the cycling of waters and water-borne effluents between water bodies and organisms – both human and non-human. As it flows, water transgresses geopolitical boundaries, defies jurisdictions, pits upstream against downstream users, and creates competition between economic sectors, both for its use and for its disposal (invoking intertwined issues of water quantity and quality). Water is thus intensely political in a conventional sense: implicated in contested relationships of power and authority.

Here, the relationship between science, technology, and water politics merits a brief explanation, as the approach taken in this special issue differs from the standard approach in political science or geopolitics. In the standard approach, water is largely framed as a backdrop to politics: an inert resource, struggles over the control of which are often the source of (at times violent) human conflicts. In contrast, the papers in this special issue begin from an interest in the human mobilization of, and interrelationship with, water. A common theme running through the papers is a focus on water’s materiality: the role that its biophysical and ecological characteristics play in shaping human perceptions, discursive constructions, and responses to water.

This focus on materiality requires an engagement with the many facets of water: a non-substitutable flow resource essential for life and ecological health, of deep spiritual and aesthetic significance, which is highly sensitive to pollution and yet a necessary input into industrialization, urbanization, and agricultural intensification. Of particular relevance is the fact that water is a resource upon whose constancy (of both quality and quantity) we depend; and yet, water engenders attempts to regulate its inherent variability in time and space – which are in turn frustrated by ecological, technological, and economic barriers to human control.

Socio-technical objects mediate this dialectic; hence the focus of the case studies in this special issue (in line with much of the water-related literature in this vein) on emblematic technologies such as the water pump (Barnes, 2012), the canal (Carse, 2012), or the dam (Sneddon, 2012; see also Coutard, 1999; Gandy, 1999; Kaika, 2005). Perhaps this approach is best framed as a kind of micro-politics, which excavates the politics of water-related technologies, their uses, and their enrolment in political agendas, all of which are simultaneously and inherently socio-technically (and hence materially) constituted (see, for example, Sara Pritchard’s (2012) analysis in this special issue of French hydro-imperialism).

However, this focus on the micro-political is not myopic; rather, the papers in this special issue articulate water along with broader issues: science, colonialism, and the relationship between water and modernity. On this latter topic, I’ll digress for a moment with the intent of providing some useful context. On the one hand, the experience of modernity is intimately, viscerally associated with water. In the West, the role of water as a resource, and aesthetic and cultural views of its place in society, changed dramatically during the 19th century: water-use practices became a source of sensual pleasure, the object of new, water-intensive personal hygiene routines, and a marker of civilization (Gandy, 2002, 2004; Goubert, 1989; Illich, 1985). The bourgeois residents of 19th- century European cities, for example, celebrated hygiene as a moral virtue. Medical researchers and social reformers allied to assert a link between clean material surroundings and moral rectitude (Luckin, 1987; Stoler, 1995).

Simultaneously, new scientific theories of disease transmission via bacteria began supplanting formerly widespread notions of ‘miasmic’ contamination (Gandy, 2006; Goubert, 1989; Hamlin, 1990, 2000). Microscopes and bacteriology began to change both our water assessment techniques – its properties, quality, risk to the human body – and water control technologies. As new discourses of ‘safe’ water emerged (associated with new water practices incumbent upon ‘modern’ citizens), local, place-based practices and perceptions of qualities of different waters were deemed ‘backward’, or ‘uncivilized’, and replaced by a more unified understanding of water defined by a ‘scientific’ analysis of its biophysical properties, although this did not completely displace ‘non-scientific’ views of water (Hamlin, 2000; Strang, 2004).

Scientific constructions of water were, in turn, central to economic modernization, as water became, literally, a lubricant for industrialization, urbanization, and agricultural intensification; these transformations required secure, continuous supplies of large amounts of relatively high-quality water. Dams and newly ‘regulated’ rivers could provide such supplies, which prompted technological innovation in hydraulic works and drinking water supply networks (see, for example, Melosi, 2000a,b; Hamlin, 1990; Tarr and Dupuy, 1988). In the 20th century, dams and reservoirs became symbolic of the twin projects of modernization and nation-building – and indeed of both colonialism and independence (d’Souza, 2006; Khagram, 2004). The domestic counterpoints of the dam were the washbasin and the private flush toilet in the boudoir, symbolic of the sensual and aesthetic roles played by water in urbanization and cultural modernization. These technologies embodied a set of assumptions about water’s renewability, abundance, and ‘self-cleaning’ abilities, underpinning acceptance of the then-new practice of using surface watercourses as the ‘ultimate sink’ for pollution, diluting and carrying away wastes from the factories and cities (Tarr, 1996).

As the papers in this special issue suggest, the modernization of water, in turn, entails new forms of governance, and newly emergent processes of state formation that administer both water use practices and the water technologies designed to support them. To give just two examples: new forms of municipal government emerged to deliver water supply (Bakker, 2011); and new regional governance mechanisms emerged to administer irrigation schemes (supplanting or complementing pre-existing forms in many parts of the world) (Mosse, 2003; Carroll, 2012). The shifting public–private divide (often accompanied by an erasure of communal forms of water governance) is central to this albeit incomplete process. As Patrick Carroll notes in his article in this issue, water became an object of government (and, I would add, of development) – a boundary object, mediating between science and governance, and allied with various forms of governance, ranging from Carroll’s ‘technoscientific state formations’ to Wade’s (1988) ‘village republics’.

Water is thus inherently political, not only because it is an object of conventional politics, but also because of its material imbrication in the socio-technical formations through which political processes unfold. This approach owes something to recent debates over studies of technology (notably, as Ashley Carse (2012) observes in his article in this issue, the productive tension between ‘top-down’ perspectives on the role of system-builders, and ‘bottom-up’ actor (or artifact)-centered studies of the social construction of technology). This approach also is indebted to recent discussions of techno-politics, particularly in anthropology, history, geography, and sociology (Bijker, 2007; Bijker et al., 1987; Mitchell, 2002). The thematic thread running through the papers in this special issue thus comes into focus: the interrelationship between water technologies, water management paradigms and associated processes of knowledge formation, organizational forms (such as the hydro-state), and governance practices. These relations are mediated through specific political projects, whether associated with colonialism, imperialism, land reclamation, or contemporary ‘development’. On this basis, the papers provide a very rich formulation of the political nature of water itself – particularly as articulated with the political nature of water infrastructure.

The materiality of water (II): Water as biopolitical

Now, let me turn to a question that is less obviously related to the papers in this special issue: How might we conceptualize water as simultaneously political and biopolitical? Let me begin with the observation that water’s materially connects individual bodies to the collective body politic; for example, by transporting vectors of disease and pollution. For this reason, the regulation and control of water-borne bodily wastes, the disposal of which has become an intensely private activity under modernity, is thus an inescapably collective act, and is essential to the health of the population, as well as the individual.

Water is thus biopolitical in the Foucauldian sense: modern governments seek to optimize both water resources and our individual water-use practices in order to secure the health and productivity of the population. This control is enacted through formal regulation, but also is self-policed through the cultural aesthetics of health and hygiene, ranging from entire bodies of water to individual human bodies. In Indonesia, for example, discourses of water-related hygiene were deployed both as evidence of the superiority of ‘modern’ colonists compared with ‘natives’, but also to justify racially segregated water supply systems (Kooy and Bakker, 2008a,b). Similarly in Australia, public health practices were allied with, often overtly racist, strategies of population management. Controlling Australia’s aboriginal population served to demarcate and define ‘white’ behavior and identities (Bashford, 2004). And this was not unique to colonial contexts: Jean-Pierre Goubert has shown how the class identity of the urban French bourgeoisie was constructed in part through the spread of the private boudoir and the use of increasingly elaborate (and expensive) hygiene-related devices and practices, which in turn justified increased investment in networked water supply systems in order to ‘water’ the city (Goubert, 1989). Similar processes have been documented for other cities, such as Guayaquil, New York, and Athens, suggesting that the way we use and relate to water is quintessentially biopolitical. By this I mean that water is simultaneously fetishized and self-consciously constitutive of both individual identity and population health (Gandy, 2004; Kaika, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2004).

Framing water as biopolitical implies a link between the constitution and consolidation of political and economic power, on the one hand, and the control of socio-natures, on the other (as Pritchard observes in her article in this issue). This, in turn, implies that studies of water must engage not only with the socio-technical, but also with the socio-natural (leaving aside the question of whether one can, or should, distinguish between the two). Some of the other papers in this special issue offer similar insights. Jessica Barnes (2012), for example, argues that we must move beyond treating technological artifacts (in her case, pumps along the river Nile) as actors, and engage with water itself as an actor. What is of interest is not merely the pump, but rather the articulation between the pump, the water, the river, the land, and farmers – as a socio-natural assemblage. Similarly, in developing a concept of ‘natural infrastructure’, and in asking how we might theorize infrastructure ecologically, Carse (2012) asks us to consider what we have lost by confining ourselves to the sphere of the socio-technical and by over-looking the material aspects of technology – not only in a biophysical sense, but also in a metabolic (to use the Marxian term) sense.

To frame this another way: by materially connecting individuals to the collective, and by linking humans so integrally to the non-human world, water poses the problem of collective action in a particularly acute way. Various disciplines have attempted to formulate terms with which to describe this interconnectedness. Economists and social scientists speak of the health benefits of clean water as a ‘public good’: non-rivalrous (in that one person’s enjoyment of water-related health should not detract from another’s), non-excludable (in that individuals cannot be excluded from the collective benefits of public health), and non-substitutable. Natural scientists speak of water’s circulation via the hydrological cycle (including the cycle through human bodies), and have coined the term ‘eco-hydrology’ to describe the interactions between water and the environment. Political ecologists prefer the term ‘hydro-social’ cycle, expanding this set of relationships to include the built (or ‘artificial’) as well as ‘natural’ environments, emphasizing the fact that water connects individuals not only politically and socially but also materially. Again, religious traditions have a completely distinct set of terms, revolving around water’s symbolic importance and sacred character. And scholars who investigate political aspects of the environment have coined terms such as ‘ecological governance’ (my preferred term). All of these perspectives attempt to capture the role of water as an integrator of individual beings, communities, and ecosystems as it flows through the hydrological cycle. The utility of the papers in this special issue – and perhaps their most novel collective contribution – is that they bring this insight to bear on discussions of the micro-politics water infrastructure. Yet they do so without engaging with the concept of biopolitics – which may be an avenue for future exploration and research.

Another suggestion for the authors of this set of papers is future engagement with scholarship on the political ecology of water. For example, Erik Swyngedouw (1999, 2004) argues that it is not the hybrid (or quasi-object) that should have ontological priority but rather the process of hybridization – the historical–geographical ‘process of production, of becoming, of perpetual transgression’ (Swyngedouw, 1996: 73; 1999: 447). The emphasis on the production of quasi-objects reflects the origins of this approach in historical materialism. In addition to studying the pump or the dam, in other words, we should also analyze the historical and geographical processes whereby the pump is produced. This is, indeed, something that most of the papers in this special issue actually do, hence the suggestion for future engagement with Swyngedouw’s work – and with debates over the political economic and political ecology of infrastructure more generally.

Water: Socio-technical, socio-natural

Underlying many contemporary conversations about nature and society is a common desire to shift our frames of reference by saying something quite simple: namely, that things other than humans make a difference for the way social relations unfold. Frequently, researchers seek to animate the non-human by seeking to understand its productive capacities: ‘what matter does rather than what its essence is’ (Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004: 672, emphasis added). Referencing ‘the material’ in this way acknowledges the embeddedness of social action. In other words, this way of framing materiality tries to do for the biophysical world what Karl Polanyi (1944) did for the social: for example, to show how conventional, contemporary framings of particular concepts or processes (such as a particular technology such as a dam, or the entire process of globalization) rely on the abstraction (or dis-embedding) of concepts like ‘the economic’ from their socio-natural and socio-technical contexts.

To put this another way: the invocation of the concept of materiality (as was the case in the original proposal for this special issue) is an acknowledgement that the ‘things’ (pumps, dams, canals), which make a difference for the way social relations unfold, are not merely pre-given substrates that enable and constrain social action; rather, they are themselves historically and geographically produced in a way that is simultaneously socio-natural and socio-technical. Thus, although there may be a straightforward motivation behind an invocation of materiality, it is in practice a difficult concept to deploy, as it calls into question many of the precepts and concepts with which we customarily order the world. To discuss materiality, for example, is to engage with metaphysical questions of agency – particularly when different socio-natures may be sources of unpredictability, unruliness, and in some cases resistance to human intentions. De-centering agency away from humans becomes a central task for the researcher – and a particularly revealing one when applied to technologies such as dams, or water supply networks, which (apparently) are so emblematic of our ability to ‘control’ nature.

This question could be have been more fully developed in this special issue, and its relevance to the study of the social construction of technology more fully explored. Should we adopt a relational view of agency? Do we need to rework our understanding of social constructionism (and, in particular, the commonplace view that ‘construction’ often implies, in Butler’s (1993) phrase, the ‘cancellation of the natural by the social’)? And how might this lead us to engage with debates over the nature–society binary? These are compelling questions prompted by the papers in this special issue, with which further studies of water and infrastructure might usefully engage.