ABSTRACT
‘Early in the process of Soviet electrification,’ writes Arkady Markin, a Soviet himself and chronicler of this era, ‘two men were arraigned for stealing energy. In Levi-Strauss’s initial offering, social context was an explicit part of the story. All humans, he ventured, hang their logical systems on scaffolding made from existing, locally salient fields of relationship. Understanding the importance of the temporal grounds for electricity networks requires a quick dip back into physics and twentieth-century solutions to the intractability of electric power. One privileges the box – a mode of conceptualizing electricity that relies strongly on the desire for electricity as a noun, a thing to be commanded and controlled and a hoped-for route of invention that will make electricity an orderable substance that it has never been.
