Groundwater in California: From Juridical and Biopolitical Governmentality to a Political Physics of Vital Processes

Amironesei, Razvan; Scoville, Caleb

doi:10.1177/0263276419850277

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…Instead, the city plans to build several pipelines to transport the cleansed effluent to water-spreading grounds or injection wells above three LA County aquifers—an undertaking intended, in the LADWP's terms, to “build a resilient storage supply in local groundwater basins” (LADWP, 2021). The water will then be stored underground before being pumped up, treated, and distributed to water users—the same punctuated spatiotemporal rhythm that marks all existing wastewater-to-drinking-water facilities in California (Amironesei and Scoville, 2019). Such arrangements are driven in part by regulatory requirements.…”

Section: Developing Underground Stockpiles Beyond La’s Borders: La Co...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature

Randle

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across Southern California. Building on writings that explore the multi-scalar politics of storing and stockpiling vaccines, resources, and lively or uncooperative commodities, this analysis approaches storage as a key moment within circulation, a dynamic, constitutive stillness that conditions flows. Three early-stage subterranean water stockpiling projects connected to the City of Los Angeles are explored, and used to demonstrate how the pursuit of storage is remaking material and political relationships within and between urban jurisdictions, while complicating long-fraught urban–rural relations within the region's waterscape. These shifts suggest the value of reorienting the notion of the urbanization of nature to better attend to the geographies of resource storage, in addition to those of resource flows and circulations.

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Section: Developing Underground Stockpiles Beyond La’s Borders: La Co...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature

Randle

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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“…This force of movement and arrangement is what I refer to as the dispositional power of algorithms that I identify as a political physics of vital processes. 2 My investigation takes inspiration from, and shares a family resemblance with, Aristotle's analysis of action in Poetics (and simultaneously his analysis of action in Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, as well as his analysis of movement in Physics, Book II). As in Aristotle's inquiry, I ask how a medium operates and what forms of association does it introduce.…”

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confidence: 93%

On the Possibilities of a Political Theory of Algorithms

Panagia

2020

Political Theory

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This essay asks how we might articulate a political theory of algorithms. To do so, I propose a political ontology of the algorithm dispositif that elaborates how algorithms arrange the movement of energies in space and time, and how they do so automatically. This force of arrangement is what I refer to as the dispositional power of algorithms that I identify as a political physics of vital processes. The essay is divided into three sections. The first provides readers of Political Theory with a discussion of three notable works in the field of critical algorithm studies relevant to a political theory of algorithms. The subsequent sections of the essay elaborate an understanding of the political ontology of the algorithm dispositif by focusing (first) on the difference that a virtual ontology introduces to our political reflections and (second) on the cybernetic operation of negative feedback that I identify as foundational to understanding an algorithm’s political physics of vital processes. I conclude that any political theory engagement with technical media can’t simply rest on an epistemic analysis of the normative effects of media but must also pursue an investigation into a medium’s modes of existence in the world.

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