Dispositional Containers: Bituminous Territories of the Athabasca Oil Sands Charles Deicke Abstract: Resisting popular notions of anthro-infrastructures as a neutral or ‘dumb’ domain, this paper reframes this space through the twinned actions of containment and transportation. By establishing the agency of containers within these actions, we may attempt to reassess infrastructure not through an objective reading of form, but an understanding of these structures as facilitators of action or temperament, able to be ‘thought’ across this territory more in terms of their disposition. Objects of containment and supply, vital to the machinery of resource production and transportation, are historically not only metaphorically associated with the feminine (a breast is a pitcher of milk, the female reproductive system a series of transitory tubes), but also historically associated with feminine labours (cooking/pots, milking/buckets, tanning/baskets). These artefacts of containment are ‘designed’, both physically and philosophically, to be unobtrusive, despite their inextricable importance to the machinery of resource production. While tempting to prescribe, to quote Zoë Sofia, only “bad metaphysics or misogyny” as the source of this obfuscation, this anthropization of thought surrounding containment infrastructures fails to assess these objects as non-human actors, capable of discerning material relationships and imposing milieus within both the transportive and productive processes. It is these intra-actions, between material and container, that provide a way of ontologizing these objects as dispositional, active forms. Utilizing the case study of natural bitumen extraction and transportation in the Athabasca oil sands of north-eastern Alberta, the twinned infrastructures of the Corridor Pipeline and Alberta Highway 63 (and their associated containers) will be exhumed and interrogated for their agential expressions, with bitumen functioning as both container and contained along these bituminous territories. This infrastructural ‘twinning’ allows for a simultaneous assessment of action through their relative positions alongside each other, compounding and unfolding as a relationship between two potentials, as opposed to forms. In resisting objective codification, what is instead revealed are the active behaviours of seemingly neutral objects within infrastructure space, and the subsquent relations with the environment-worlds which surround them.
Keywords: Athabasca oil sands, supply infrastructure, resource containers, milieus, disposition
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Design, Philosophy, Architecture
Dispositional Containers: Bituminous Territories of the Athabasca Oil Sands Charles Deicke We find ourselves on Alberta Highway 63, just outside of the ‘boomtown’ of Fort McMurry, the nucleus for Suncor’s bitumen extraction operation within the Athabasca Oil Sands. Across a manicured verge lies a twin; sitting atop its own scarified pathway from Fort McMurry to Suncor’s refineries in Edmonton, its HDPE skin glinting in the sunlight, appears the Corridor Pipeline. These twins serve similar purposes. They both contain; the highway, bitumen as ‘product’, holds macerated stone in place. The pipeline keeps processed bitumen within, all remnants of its nascent material entanglements removed. Between Fort McMurry and Edmonton, these two non-human objects lie in relative position to one another, their milieus of containment facilitating the movement of both human and non-human entities; yet, they remain unobtrusive. For containers, as both a physical object and a related process that ‘make up’ these twinned infrastructural territories, are rarely considered to be agents; they are volumes and skins within an objective world, one in which we are believed to be the author. Yet, as the pipeline leaks and the pavement oozes, as the bitumen is separated from the wood and the road undulates, all within our view from this vantage point, there is clearly something more at play.
An objective reading of infrastructure space, inobservant of its position as an agential container for the non-human entities on which it acts, and the multiplicitous implications of this relationship, proves unthinkable when one aims to seriously consider its processes. Averting this requires a degree of tentacular thinking, to borrow a phrase from Donna Haraway; for tentacularity is about “life lived along lines…not at points, not in spheres.”, as is the temptation when thinking the formal machinery of resource production and supply.1 This may be attempted, in our case, through a closer inspection of the spatial and material requirements imposed by the process of containment, found in the actions of both production and transportation. Doing so allows containers to unravel as not dumb but highly agential, providing us a method of ‘thinking’ that circumvents our objective preconceptions, allowing for an analysis of not objective but dispositional, active forms. For containers in their agency locate activity and discern material relationships, imposing milieus in both the transportive and productive processes, actions that compound and interlink to outline the contours and flows of this bituminous territory. Within, we can hope to see beyond the welltread phenomena of form or content, looking more towards action and temperament as a way of thinking these containing apparatuses and their associated feral effects. ‘Othered ’ Containers Contemporary material practices, those that imagine the non-human world as an environmental “super mother” to be serialized and ordered through opaque infra and supra structures of supply, are inextricably reliant on both a process and a philosophy of containment.2 Zoe Sofoulis, in her essay Container Technologies, describes containers as existing via the “habitual assumption that space is merely an unintelligent container, or containers dumb spaces”.3 Sofoulis describes containers as belonging to a ‘technics of the unobtrusive’ as developed in the work of historian Lewis Mumford in Technics
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and Human Development (1966), whereby a traditional association exists between objects of containment and traditional female labours (ie. cooking/pots, tanning/baskets), as well as more metaphorical, bodily associations (breasts/milk, womb/personhood, reproductive system/tubes). The ontological recession of the container, by way of their ‘menial’ or ‘non-dynamic’ processes’ in opposition to other infrastructural apparatus’ like the boring machine or the World Wide Web, has created an unacknowledged indebtedness to the container as a technological object.4 This predisposition to reducing containers, in our case those that constitute the infrastructure spaces of transportation and production in the Athabasca, to mere receptacles of essential matter as opposed to agential actors able to enforce and dictate relationships both within and outside the environment-worlds in which they act, is not solely influenced by a misogynistic representation in the history of technology. Sofoulis acknowledges containers as structurally necessary to the processes of ‘production’ in the physical sense, and ‘becoming’ in the ontological sense; this is a point of tension, as both are relatively unacknowledgeable. One could argue however that these objects are acknowledgable, we just may not have the tools to think these objects as being anything other than unobtrusive vessels of supply. An analyst of containers is thus forced to work “against the grain of the objects and spaces themselves”, that being their imposed obfuscation.5 Thus, what we must find are moments of intrusion, wherein the relationship between container and material become legible within the actions of production and transportation, as is their function within the Athabasca. What results is an opportunity for an analysis of their disposition through these associated milieus and intra-actions, the tool via which they can begin to be thought.
Milieus of Production : The Pipe and the Bitumen Production, when defined by the terms or scale of the ‘hyperobject’, too large and too complex for human cognition, appears as a totalizing 3
concept, one of many within an already all subsuming supersystem of global capital.6 While undoubtedly massive in scale, such a reduction, albeit one that reduces ‘up’ to position productive systems as some kind of feral God, instead of an earthly progenitor of feral effects, removes the ability to establish the specific ontological and material imbalances present within the productive process. Our situation within the Athabasca oil sands presents production as pertaining to a particular series of intra-actions of both material and container, birthing a specific mode of production, with its own associated effects and entanglements. Louis Althusser defines a mode of production as a “certain way of producing, that is, of coming to grips with nature in order to draw from it the products that people in a social formation need to subsist”.7 The Althusserian definition of production is tripartite; production is one, a process with inherent specificity, two, is an activity that codifies and segments the nascent non-human world, and three, produces objects with social functions (this includes containers, among other things). The specificity of production imposes itself on bitumen through its first encounter with the processes of both containment and transportation, within the pipeline itself. In its unextracted, nascent state, within the environment world of muskeg common to the arctic and boreal areas of Alberta, bitumen is entangled with a variety of other non-human actors, such as silica sand, petrified wood, and water. This material agglomeration, referred to as ‘natural bitumen’ (present tense) or ‘unconventional oil’ (future tense), is deemed unsuitable for immediate dispersal through the network of hydrotransport that connects each stage of the refining process.8 This unsuitability is twofold, with the material acted upon both by the twinned processes of containment and transportation; in the transportive sense, from an inability to transpose itself across territory in an act of continual supply due to the immense viscosity of the unextracted mixture, and in a containment sense, for its ability to exert unwanted effects (damage) on the container itself through its own unrefined properties. Design, Philosophy, Architecture
Presented is a duel-notion of containers, wherein both the processes of containment and transportation exert pressure on, and have pressure exerted on themselves by, the medium on which they carry out these functions, in this case, that being freshly extracted bitumen. What results is a paradigm that problematizes containers as seemingly neutral spaces, and transportation as an unobtrusive, ‘background’ process, instead framing these two conditions as highly contingent on a variety of both human and non-human apparatuses and environments. Containers, through their specific pre-conditions of use and implantation within a larger infrastructural network, draw parallels to Latour’s notion of the ‘sociotechnical actor’, in which the contingent character of an object (container) arises from its relations within an 4
actor-network.9 Sofoulis describes these entities as important “not in terms of the entity’s peculiar properties examined in isolation” (form), but as contingent actors that effect “a whole environment, field, or network” (through agency).10 The danger presented by this contingent entanglement between resource and ‘other’, that of a disruption to the productive process through interference between the container and its ability to carry out the act of transportation, arises from its unknowability. Natural bitumen is prescribed as ‘natural’ due to this very fact, that the non-human is non-neutral, it is an agential actor that must have the productive milieu forced upon it in order to function unobtrusively. Design, Philosophy, Architecture
This milieu, in the Deleuzoguattarian sense, takes the form of a “codification of repetitions, a limitation and rhythmatization on the chaos”.11 When transposed onto the productive process, it appears as if the container is the enforcer of this milieu, imposing a process of filtration and separation as a means to eliminate that which is ‘unknowable’ from the transportive process. Chaos, on the other hand, takes the form of our entangled material as an element of the virtual, that which “contain[s] all possible particles and draw[s] out all possible forms”.12 The ‘chaos’ of this particular material relationship is represented through not only a physical power to act on that which we have designed to be unobtrusive instruments of production, but also speaks to an ontological danger, the ever present threat that our social ideals of production are able to be undermined by nonhuman actors, somewhere down the production line.
the objects”, our bituminous territory could be defined not through object properties in isolation, but instead through a compounding series of actions between agential objects (the container and its contents).14 What is presented through the assessment of these objects through their specific interrelationships with material, is the creation of another reading outside of the objective practices so commonly applied to infrastructure space, one that acknowledges containers as containing expression or action, transforming them from objective form to active form. It is to this end that we may begin to assess their dispositional characteristics. Disposition, while able to be applied to one series of relations, does not operate only in isolation. Although fulfilling the role of contained material in this circumstance, bitumen itself contains along this territory, making up the other half of our dizygotic infrastructures.
Transportive Territories : Alberta Highway 63 and the Corridor Pipeline Alberta Highway 63, the artery of bitumen that links Suncor’s mining operations in Fort McMurry to the regional centre of Edmonton, began construction in 196215, five years after Suncor’s predecessor Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. acquired patents and leases in the Fort McMurray area.16 It appears as if bitumen acts through predisposition; bitumen thus takes
In this set of relations, the container imposes its own milieu through the ordering and control on its interior, while its exterior is subsumed by a larger technic of the unobtrusive, in itself a separate milieu. However, it is this abjection, created by the interrelation of milieus that privilege the social result of production as opposed to the non-human relationships that constitute it, that a specific territory arises, which MacGregor Wise establishes as an “accretion of milieu effects.”13 If milieus, to quote Bruce Janz, provide the “meanings of objects”, in this case the container that defines the condition of the material within , while territory is the “expression that becomes possible through 5
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the form of a non-agnetial ‘facilitating ecology’, the premeditator of transportation across vast territories that much be traversed in order to, in this instance, gain further access to bitumen itself. However, to frame bitumen’s obfuscation entirely in this regard is to position it only as a subject of human social function, as opposed to itself being agential in its own fulfilment of the role of container, with its own associated milieus and intra-actions, those that refuse to cohere to a fixed position or neutral plane. The very structure of bitumen as road surface is in itself a material agglomeration; bitumen is used to bind together aggregate in the form of equally sized rocks, which are then laid upon
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the ground and left to set. The bitumen holds the aggregate in place, fixing and solidifying it into a homogenous surface, yet, on a molecular level, the bitumen remains viscous. Similar to the Heideggerian mediation on the jug, whose character resides “in its being qua vessel”, bitumen gives function through a process of solidification, yet transposes itself over time through its incredible viscosity.18 What is presented is an example of the Baradian notion of infra-action; bitumen is not only a neutral body on which humans exercise their own relations, that being mass-transportation, but is also an agential container of a “dynamism of forces”, that being the dual action of solidification and slow, gradual seepage.19 It is in this act of containment, the relationship between bitumen and aggregate, between
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binding and seepage, that the non-human bitumen gains the ability to act on the human subject through moments of both function and deformation. The ever-present viscosity of bitumen and its relationship to the aggregate which it surrounds, its ‘interstitial nature’ built on the continual intra-action between mediums, provides a platform for this dynamism of forces, acting both within and outside its own skin. For bitumen is not a homogenous, flat surface, but is an everchanging topography, replete with deflections, crumbling edges, markings, and potholes that arise through use. For bitumen not only binds and seeps as a pre-established body, but it also contains and entangles that which it sits upon, the ground. Once again returning to Heidegger’s mediation on the jug, whereby its being is only fulfilled by via the tripartite actions of holding, keeping and outpouring,20 bitumen similarly gains ontological prominence through a tripartite act, of binding, seeping and an intra-action with the soil below, that which is registered in the human conception by the aforementioned deformities within the process of transportation. While occurring wholly in the non-human realm, this registration within our human systems, particularly those so obfuscated as part of a ‘technics of the unobtrusive’ by way of their position as both containers, and their traversal through another insulating technological container (that is also readily interpreted as masculine, the car), these moments of intraaction are key to resisting the notion that bitumen is entirely predispositional. In this instance, through the vectors of forces carried out in this tripartite act of containment, bitumen refuses to adhere to a fixed position, instead constantly interpolating between states. This intra-action and the processes that facilitate it, much like milieu of the productive process encoding the container’s ability to act, provides a foothold for disposition to unravel. Vantage Points in Disposition While it has been established that within the actof containment, expressed within the milieus of transportation and production, containers find agency through their interactions with other entangled materials and environments, this 7
has not rendered them indelibly ‘present’, both physically and ontologically. What is instead felt is their effects, such as the seepage from the tailing pond, or the deforesting required for an expansion of the Highway 63. If, to quote Keller Easterling, disposition “…locates activity, not in movement, but in relationship or relative position”, we may find a way to observe these twinned actions that compound and interlink to define this bituminous territory from our vantage point across from one another. 21 What is proposed is not an attempt to grasp at an objective form; to do this is to attempt to control an object by way of its author, the human actor that operates on the non-human as has been the case historically. Instead, by assessing these two objects, the pipeline and highway, as active forms of containment that maintain particular contours within the transportive and productive networks of bitumen, we may assess them for their trajectories in these instances, as opposed to only their purported events or malfunctions. The very notion of disposition is that it cannot, or is not designed to be seen, much like the technics of the unobtrusive that subsumes our notions of the container. This is why disposition remains an underexplored avenue for thinking through these linked territories, that are made up of, in this instance, the undeclared power of the container. This forms the crux of our position on Highway 63, looking out towards the Corridor Pipeline just across the verge; that we may see two dispositions play out, and then use dispositional thinking itself to comprehend their faculties. For dispositional thinking works in multiple ways; it is both a product of intra-actions between agential bodies, as well as a mode of thinking that forms part of our repertoire for understanding these forms, not in terms of the volume of the container or its reflective HPDE skin, but in terms of where they are going and how they will play. For pipes produce tailings, another transports them to the pond. Highways run next to pipelines; both scarify the ground. Bitumen holds stones; both create potholes. Roads cover the ground, which first must be cleared. All of these are dispositions, properties and propensities that interact within and outside of themselves along this territory, taking pleasure in their ability to create cascading effects. It is up to us to read these closely. Design, Philosophy, Architecture
Notes 1. Haraway, Donna J. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E-flux. Accessed June 09, 2021. https://www.eflux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinkinganthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. 2. Sofia, Zoe. “Container Technologies.” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 181. doi:10.1353/hyp.2000.0029. 3. Ibid, 182. 4. Mumford, Lewis. “Technics and Human Development.” New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966: 1401-141. 5. Sofia, “Container Technologies.”: 188 6. Ibid. 7. Morton, Timothy. “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 8. Althusser, Louis, G. M. Goshgarian, and Warren Montag. “Philosophy for Nonphilosophers.” London: Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017: 132. 9. “OPP: Ore Preparation Plants Explained.” Oil Sands Magazine. March 03, 2021. Accessed June 09, 2021. https://www.oilsandsmagazine. com/technical/mining/ore-preparation-plant.
16. Klinkenberg, Marty. “Twinning not only option for reducing the carnage, says original road builder.” Edmonton Journal. 2012. 17. Steve Jenkinson, Calgary Herald. “Oilsands Timeline: Origins of the Oilsands.” Calgary Herald. September 25, 2017. Accessed June 09, 2021. https://calgaryherald.com/business/ local-business/oilsands-timelines-origins-ofthe-oilsands. 18. Lumley, Laurence. “The Invisible Bitumenous Desert.” Log, no. 47 (Fall 2019): 26. 19. Heidegger, Martin, and Albert Hofstadter. “Poetry, Language, Thought.” New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2013. 161. 20. Barad, Karen Michelle. “Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.” Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 21. Heidegger and Albert Hofstadter. Poetry, Language, Thought. 171-172. 22. Easterling, Keller. “Disposition” in Hauptmann, Deborah, Warren Neidich, and Andreas Angelidakis. Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics: Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication & Information. Rotterdam: 010, 2010.
10. Latour, Bruno. “Pragmatogonies.” American Behavioral Scientist 37, no. 6 (1994): 791-808. doi: 10.1177/0002764294037006006. 11. Sofia, “Container Technologies.”: 194 12. Janz, Bruce B. “The Territory Is Not Map: Place, Deleuze and Guattari, and African Philosophy.” Philosophy Today 45, no. 4 (2001): 396. doi:10.5840/philtoday200145426. 13. Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, Hugh Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell. “What Is Philosophy?” London: Verso, 2015: 118. 14. Wise, J. Macgregor. “Home: Territory And Identity.” Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2000): 298. doi:10.1080/095023800334896. 15. Ibid. 8
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