ABSTRACT
“BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES,” writes Diane di Prima in Revolutionary Letters (1968), “why not?” This question of infrastructural vandalism in environmental strategy has recently resurfaced in opposition to the climate movement’s refusal of militant tactics. Situating the political ecology of sabotage, however, demands an understanding of insurgency that goes beyond the spectacular wreckage of “ecotage” to encompass fugitive strategies outside the hegemonic publics and orthodoxies of environmental politics. Where fossil capital undermines the conditions of reproduction by sabotaging metabolic cycles from above, to read sabotage from below necessitates engagement with practices of “counter-disposition” that frame “struggle as poiesis”. Framing sabotage as an “ongoing condition of being in disagreement, refusal and withdrawal,” we trace clandestine acts that work to stutter, stall, and glitch the infrastructures of capital. Across three key sites—the pipeline, the factory, and the blockade—we consider covert resistances to resource extraction, settler-colonialism, and capitalist sabotage that exceed the call to “blow up,” instead embracing friction, obstruction, and disrepair as strategies for slowing down. Moving between these sites necessarily shifts the terrain of ecopoetics, revealing the imbrication of struggles over fossil-fuelled value production and social reproduction. From Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s “fine thread of deviation” (1917) to Saidiya Hartman’s “minor history of insurrection,” rethinking ecopoetics through sabotage draws attention to struggles that not only manifest as friction in the circulation of fossil capital but also outline wayward tactics as “the social poesis of the dispossessed” (2019).
From its earliest articulation as a modality of refusal in the late nineteenth century, sabotage has been defined by a duality of perspectives: from above and from below. Against accumulating crises of capital and climate, sabotage has not only resurfaced as a strategy for direct action against infrastructures of fossil capital, such as pipelines, ports, and oil drills, but also as a means of reckoning with capitalism’s accelerating destabilisation of the environmental conditions necessary for the reproduction of life. Where contemporary discourse has been largely contoured by incendiary calls for the spectacular wreckage of fossil capital’s machinery, we turn instead to a clandestine theory of sabotage to trace tactics that stutter, stall, or glitch the infrastructures of production, circulation, and colonial dispossession. Understood as a form of antagonistic poiesis, this chapter asks what it might mean to read for sabotage as a formal and tactical inflection, capturing a dialectic of making and unmaking; logistical rupture and counter-infrastructure; resurgence and refusal. Across three critical terrains of intervention – the factory, the pipeline, and the blockade – we trace the relation between poetic practice and saboteurial praxis, identifying a tendency towards negation, blockage, and refusal within contemporary poetics reflective of a ground shift in ecocritical thought towards an infrastructural, insurrectionary, and abolitionist horizon. Revisiting work by Ida Börjel, Stephen Collis, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, this chapter takes up sabotage as a new critical grammar for the study of ecopoetics and frames a militant ecology that manifests both as friction in the flows of capital and a radical refusal of its ongoing disruption of socioecological structures that sustain us.
