A swimming pool that’s also a glass tank, a ladder leaning casually against the edge, suggesting either leisure or gruelling underground work.

*

It is difficult to write about water, to represent water, to conceive of water as both a substance – the physical liquid that flows out of a tap or runs along a riverbed – and as a mass, ‘stuff’ – this material that has to be managed and filtered and mastered through complex systems in order to maintain life, order, social cohesion.

At the same time, writing about water is the easiest thing in the world. It’s everywhere, in everything. All you have to do is let it flow.

Water as:

force,
substance,
conduit,
material,
resource,
element,
hazard,
abundance,
spring;
bringer of
disease,
disaster,
strength,
civilisation,
power,
death;
source of
sustenance,
trade,
equilibrium,
replenishment,
life.

*

In his 1998 book, Seeing like a State, James C. Scott identifies an ‘authoritarian high modernist’ approach to government in the early twentieth century; Scott’s book traces how this shift in governance led to the structural eradication of certain ways of life and forms of knowledge, the mobile, itinerant, the provisional, the contingent, the localised. The book surveys several ‘high modernist’ engineering projects through which the modern state extended and developed its methods of management, under the premise of taming or mastering or containing those aspects of society and nature previously deemed uncontainable, rendering order out of them, making them ‘governable’.

Amongst these projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933 to modernise and transform the Tennessee River, one of the largest rivers in the US, flowing for 652 miles across seven different state territories – including many of the most deprived areas of the country. The TVA undertook a swathe of major civil engineering projects, including the construction of several huge dams, harnassing hydroelectric power to bring electricity and economic development to these impoverished regions, dramatically altering the landscape and displacing many communities in the process. The legacy of this huge infrastructural project is still visible across the South.

According to Scott, the mechanics and logic of the TVA’s activities demonstrate how water went from being understood as an elemental substance to being conceived as a ‘natural resource’. This shift was a key component within the new philosophy of water management, predicated upon a standardised and rationalised view of the relationship between humans and their surroundings. Such thinking was aligned with the rise of statistical governance – a managerial approach to, for instance, ‘populations’ instead of people. In the process, much traditional localised knowledge of how bodies of water are used and maintained was effectively displaced – instead, water management became a matter of hydraulic engineering, accounting, water economics. According to Scott and others who have built on his insights, this ‘modernist’ state-thinking has had the effect of obliterating those knowledges not deemed rational or official – knowledges that are subaltern or provisional, specific to particular places and ways of living, what Scott calls ‘metis’ though we might equally, I think, call it ‘situated’.

*

A row of taps, of various shapes and with different finishings, hung at regular intervals along the wall. Plexiglass rod protrusions hang from each, knotted at the bottom, a suggestion – or threat – of abundance curtailed.

*

In the 1970s, a group of urban planners and specialists proposed to install a dam on the Trinity River in Dallas, creating a man-made lake to enliven the city’s downtown area, which was then a commercial district with little culture or nightlife. Town Lake would be an amenity for the city, a space for recreation and leisure, that would also contribute to property prices in the district. To create it, several blocks of midtown and downtown Dallas would have to be demolished, then flooded, displacing communities and completely reconfiguring the city.

In 1984, Ivan Illich, the radical anarchist philosopher and social critic (and Catholic priest), was invited by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture to contribute to a series of talks, prompted by plans for Town Lake, on mankind’s relationship to water. The resulting lecture, later published as H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985), is a startling, amorphous, boundary-shifting, occasionally frustrating and sometimes plain weird account of how we, individually and collectively, socially, think about water. Taking Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination (1942) as a starting point, Illich considers how we imagine water as matter, this sustaining ‘stuff’ through which we also make sense of the world.

He begins by querying one fundamental assumption, underpinning Town Lake and other regeneration programmes of its kind, that water is, in and of itself, morally fortifying. In fact, he argues, there are (at least) two different kinds of water – there is ‘the liquid that is metered and distributed by the authorities’ but there is also ‘the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination … a vehicle for metaphors, a shifting mirror’, a form of deeply ambiguous, chaotic, incomprehensible ‘stuff’. It is in the latter that Illich is interested: water as category, water as imagined material.

It seems to me that in Water – More or Less Marie Hanlon is interested, not in this high-minded abstraction, but in the more prosaic forms of water: the taps, the pipes, the meters; the complex, utilitarian, non-picturesque systems through which water is circulated and processed and dispensed at scale. The mechanisms through which it’s managed and maintained. Its containment and the limits of its containment. The possibilities of flood, failure, overspill, submersion, fracture, breakage. The vulnerability of our relationship to water. And the desperate need to understand it, differently, before it is too late.

*

A sequence of images: a submerged farm, a pedestrian bridge, a stretch of fencing, a barn in Athlone, a whole valley. Fields, gardens, streets full of water. Towns flooded, tables, benches. People wading through the floods, reckoning with the aftermath, regarding flooded homes and streets, ruined interiors, sodden furniture, kitchens and living spaces destroyed; cars flooded, floating, water up to waist height. Waves crash against the meagre defenses of coastal villages around the country, sending spray cascading over their waterfront façades.

In the aftermath, people sit on whatever bit of wall or gate protrudes and observe the wreckage. Others carry on: someone sits in a dinghy being pulled along a flooded estate; a schoolboy cycles his bike, the wheels almost entirely submerged. In one image, a barge painted raspberry red and bright spring green passes through a flooded street, a line of bollards poking from the water behind it like navigational markers, as if the inhabitants of this town have simply acquiesced, acclimatising to this new watery environment, the flooded street now something to be simply navigated.

In the background, the sound of water, running.

*

The word ‘infrastructure’ is notoriously slippery. It was first popularised in English as a military term, borrowed from the French by NATO advisors and staff under President Eisenhower in the post-war period, as the US government were devising their policy of ‘containment’ in relation to the Soviet Union, laying the groundwork for the Cold War. It soon expanded to take in other forms of complex built structural systems, like roads, rail, power, communications.

In conversation recently, writer and artist Jessica Foley spoke of ‘infrastructure’ as a ‘plastic word’, an amorphous term capable of shifting (and being weaponised) in whatever ways are deemed ideologically necessary or convenient. Most recently, it has been utilised and contested in debates about public policy and ‘decaying infrastructure’ in the US, as well as the global public health crisis surrounding Covid-19. One interesting commonality to the various definitions and kinds of infrastructure – however defined – is that, for the most part, in the twenty-first century, infrastructure becomes visible only at those moments when it breaks down.

This word’s semantic slipperiness might be countered by another with which it has an uneasy correlation: maintenance. It is, after all, one thing to build: to generate the extraordinary creative and imaginative energy required to conceive of and construct something utterly new. It is quite another thing, equally important though in general far less valued, to maintain, care for, look after, sustain, mend, keep alive.

*

In The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard writes about her home in Yorkshire being flooded during the Christmas floods in 2015. She and her family had left the house to visit her parents for Christmas; when they returned, the water had reached the ground-floor ceiling. She writes about the shock of this experience, its sudden invasiveness, rendering her helpless, homeless, unable to keep her family together.

This flood, foreshadowed throughout the book but explored in its final chapter, is one key constellation point through which Hildyard thinks through the concept of the ‘second body’: the idea that we have two bodies, one physical, corporeal, bounded, a body over which we have autonomy; and then another, second body, extended in space, interconnected with others, global, social, interplanetary. ‘My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house.’

Hildyard’s book is a lightning bolt, offering a way of thinking through the combined crises of the twenty-first century, crises of borders and climate and displacement and migration and over-consumption, and the need to imagine a collective self, a self that can acknowledge its connection to others, humans and non-humans, the materials and agencies of the world around us.

*

The Trevi Fountain dates from the fourth century though it was redesigned in the eighteenth, an extravagant commission for a baroque façade, designed by Nicola Salvi. The Taming of the Waters features several inset niches along the front of the Palazzo Poli, which frames the fountain, with statues in Carrara marble arranged in theatrical poses, each occupying its own designated niche, like characters in a vast over-elaborated advent calendar. This extraordinary tableau is a triumphal celebration of water, with Oceanus at the centre, on a chariot, pulled by two tritons representing the vacillations of the sea – one calm, the other careening. In the surrounding niches are Abundance (brandishing a horn) and Health (brandishing a cup); above is a series of bas reliefs, one depicting the emperor Agrippa, who ordered construction of the Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct channelling water from Salone springs, twenty-two kilometres away, to its triumphal terminus here, at the meeting of the three streets.

In his book on the history of water management, David Sedlak notes that these elaborate fountains – these spectacular public spaces – were not intended in the way we understand them now, as temples of leisure, exemplary public spaces, extravagance and civilisation laid out for anyone to enjoy. In fact, they were a public demonstration of a great, largely invisible, feat of engineering: the creation of Rome’s water system, the first exercise in mass water distribution, servicing what had become the largest city in the world. The celebrated viaducts were just one small part of this mostly subterranean gravity-fed system, channelling water from rivers and lakes around the city. The city’s fountains, like the Trevi Fountain, were dramatic representations of Rome’s mastery over this elemental substance – taming it, making it serve the needs of man.

*

There is a tension in the exhibition between water as material, with all its abstract qualities, and water as catalyst, or conductor, or – I don’t know what to call it – flow: the complex interplay of social and political cross-currents that constitute this substance that surrounds and defines us.

*

In 1922, while working as an engineer in Berlin and observing large-scale hydroelectric projects being implemented across Europe, Thomas McLaughlin developed his ideas for a major civil engineering project, rerouting a stretch of the River Shannon to fuel a hydroelectric power station near Limerick, generating electricity at a scale sufficient to allow for the construction of a national grid, an audacious project for a small, sidelined, newly-decolonised country.

While travelling in Europe, observing water-powered electricity networks in Pomerania (‘[a]n electricity network extended like a spider’s web all over the country’) as well as others across Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, France, he concentrated on how such developments could be applied in Ireland, contextualising what he saw in the light of his commitment to the cause of the new Irish Free State:

No sincere student could have lived through that whole period of intense national enthusiasm without feeling a passionate desire to do all in his power to assist in national reconstruction, and in the building up of the country by development from within. It was with this intense feeling I began my career abroad, and the ideal never for a moment left me until it brought me home again to see the Shannon Scheme realised. It was little credit to me – I could know no mental peace, no sense of self-fulfilment until my mission in life, as it had then become to me, was realised. Everything I saw abroad, everything I read of, brought just one thought to my mind – can this development be applied at home? Could we have this in Ireland? Such were the natural yearnings of a youth of that inspiring period.

The development of the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme, and particularly the construction of the colossal plant at Ardnacrusha, was an extraordinary feat of civil engineering. If we follow Scott’s thinking, we could also think of it as a gargantuan exercise in statecraft, the announcement of a new state’s modernity, its mastery over its waters, its ability to harness those elements previously deemed ungovernable. This engineering project was itself, as much as Sean Keating’s famous murals celebrating the Shannon Scheme, an exercise in rhetoric and propaganda – and an obliteration of the local knowledge through which the river had always been maintained, an act of violence whose consequences are still being grappled with today.

*

I came across Ivan Illich’s book by way of the poet and critic Jackie Wang, whose current writing emerges from her interest in psychoanalytic and philosophical conceptualisations of water, bodies of water, and particularly the ‘oceanic’, a term which counters and queries certain assumptions within human geography. In ‘Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect’ (2020), Wang glosses psychoanalytic and philosophical discussions of the ‘oceanic’ (by Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Marion Milner, Fred Moten), positing two ways of thinking through endless water. On the one hand, there is the joyful oceanic – conceiving of water as collectivity, interconnectedness, a means for thinking communally about the ways in which we interdepend. On the other, there is the melancholy oceanic, the sense of water as representing dispersal, oblivion, the dissipation of the ego. Hearing her read recently from her work-in-progress, ‘Waters: bitter death: lost’, was mesmerising: a kind of incantation, exploring affect and civil engineering, drowning, grief, memorialisation, loss.

*

A forest of tall plexiglass columns, half-filled with a mess of water and oil, a grid of plexiglass tubes intersecting overhead. Again there is tension: oil, this extractive residue, recalcitrant, unpredictable, but contained within the [studied] abstraction of the grid.

*

Desalination is one of the major engineering proposals currently being explored globally as a solution to widespread (growing) water scarcity. Extensive desalination plants are being constructed worldwide to pipe and filter seawater, removing salts and particles to create drinkable freshwater; the process leaves behind a toxic brine. There is something extraordinary – also bracing, fearsome, destabilising – about the magnitude of these undertakings, the sheer (necessary) egotism of them. So how are we supposed to represent – to understand – such colossal fictions? For they are fictions, as any such feats of engineering are fictions. They require a particular kind of agreed narrative: a problem, a journey, a ‘solution’. But are they stories of resilience and ingenuity or are they stories of extremity, scarcity, need?

*

While writing, an emergency situation has been announced (in the West, at least) in Madagascar. The most intense drought in forty years has left tens of thousands without food, during what would ordinarily have been a bountiful time of year; the prospects for the coming months, traditionally the lean period for those on the island, before harvest, are catastrophic. It is being referred to as the first ‘climate-change famine’, the first famine that hasn’t been occasioned by conflict but by environmental conditions.

The infrastructure becomes visible only when it starts to fail.

1. Scott, James C., Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–6.

2. Scott’s analysis of the Tennessee Valley Authority was not included in his 1998 book, for reasons of space, but was published separately some years later. See James C. Scott, ‘High Modernist Social Engineering: The Case of the Tennessee Valley Authority’, in Experiencing the State, eds. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Jacobsen, John Kurt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

3. Illich, Ivan, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Notes on the Historicity of ‘Stuff’ (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985), 24–5.

4. Schulman, Peter E., ‘What Infrastructure Really Means’, The Atlantic, 13 July 2021; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/what-does-infrastructure-mean/619419/, accessed 14 September 2021.

5. Hildyard, Daisy, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), 91,

6. Sedlak, David, Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 3,

7. McLaughlin, Thomas, ‘How I Thought of the Shannon Scheme’, RTE script, 1938, ESB Archive; see Delany, Brendan, ‘McLaughlin, the Genesis of the Shannon Scheme and the ESB’, in The Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of the Irish Free State, ed. Andy Bielenberg (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002), 12.

8. Wang, Jackie, ‘Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect’, anticorps, exh. cat., Palais de Tokyo, 23 October 2020–28 February 2021; https://anticorps-palaisdetokyo.com/en/texts/oceanic-feeling-and-communist-affect, accessed 15 September 2021.

9. Fountain, Henry, ‘The World Can Make More Water From the Sea, but at What Cost?’, New York Times, 22 October 2019; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/climate/desalination-water-climate-change.html, accessed 15 September 2021.