Scenes of subjection: Extractive frontiers, symbolic violence, dispossession

Abstract

This article discusses how, besides structural and direct modes of violence traditionally attributed to natural resource exploitation, extractive frontiers also unfold through material and affective registers of symbolic violence. This concerns the violence of capital that promises a “better life” whose actual realisation, directly implicated in circuits of “free” market economy, is constantly deferred to the future. Empirically grounded in experiences of dispossession and resettlement caused by coal extraction in Tete, Mozambique, the article employs symbolic violence as an analytic to understand subjectivation constituted by the failed promise of “development” of Tete's extractive frontier. This, the article argues, results in specific scenes of subjection – exposure to the symbolic violence of extractivism, as well as potential contestations of it, through which those dispossessed by mining come into being as subjects of power. These scenes of subjection are temporal: they transform – expand, flutter, retreat – reflecting broader, inherently unstable economies of extraction. As such, subjection to violence is not final but remains susceptible to contestation, mediation, or escalation. Nevertheless, the article shows how, in spite of this potentiality of change, until recently, in Tete symbolic violence had justified, reproduced, and sustained the power of extractivism, as well as of capital more broadly, even within the lifeworlds dispossessed, or otherwise laid to waste, by extractive frontiers of capital.