Deadly Lifeworlds Meet Palliative Politics: Struggle in Circulation

This paper locates acute and ongoing crises of coloniality and ecology within struggles over circulation that are anchored in infrastructure. If infrastructure organises movement—including its constraint in carceral forms—then it is also a linchpin for materialising distinct regimes of motion (Nail 2020a; Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism). A regime of motion may be inherently violent, underpinning reproduction for some by interrupting it for others. It may be assembled to sustain imperialism's “expanded reproduction”, curtailing or crushing the plethora of alternative forms to produce premature death. Yet, a focus on struggles over the organisation of motion and, specifically, the contestation of imperial infrastructure, allows the practical assembly of otherwise and alimentary forms to become apprehensible. Journeying through logistics systems that both craft and cut through colonial ecologies, this essay tracks haunted rails, moves across racial and national borders of land, labour, livestock, and the human, and into the intimate space of the singular microbiome. Holding seemingly disparate sites of crisis together, it attends to practices of survivance of those who refuse the violently sculpted borders of life and death. I ask, what infrastructural inheritances usher in this apocalyptic era and how might an immanent politics of care and collaboration—a palliative politics—orient us towards other paths?