9 Politicizing Water, Politicizing Natures: Or .

 . . “Water
Does Not Exist!”
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Let nothing be called natural

In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
—Bertolt Brecht, from the prologue to The Exception and the Rule

Beyond H2O

The journey through more than a century of Spain’s tumultuous histori-

cal and geographical transformation has come to an end. Throughout, I
explored how the socio-ecological meanderings of water became etched
into the transformation of the hydro-social cycle. This process of hydro-
modernization laid bare the variegated relations of power through which
water becomes enrolled, transformed, and distributed. I showed how the
matter of nature enters the domain of the political and, through this, how
environmental reconfiguration parallels the continuous socio-spatial trans-
formation of both state forms and social orderings.
The story was wedged between two emblematic crisis moments. It began
with El Disastre—the inglorious end of empire in 1898—and the painful
convulsions of a country that found itself in a traumatic postimperial con-
dition as the geopolitical coordinates of imperial constellations shifted rap-
idly; it ended, more than one hundred years later, in 2010, also a time
deep economic crisis, widespread cultural anxiety, intensifying social con-
flict, and geopolitical transformation. The book presented Spain’s turbu-
lent twentieth century as a political-ecological project marked by profound
changes, punctuated by periods of great hope and expectations, intense
Copyright 2015. The MIT Press.

social and political conflict, democratic reform and political closure, brutal
civil war and dictatorship, shattering crises and remarkable socio-spatial
and cultural change.

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AN: 986381 ; Erik Swyngedouw.; Liquid Power : Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain
Account: s2953473.main.ehost
 224 Chapter 9

The political-ecological processes that shaped these transformations

were mobilized as the lens through which a wider set of issues related to
nature, the environment, modernity and political power were explored.
This book offered a story of the extraordinary meanderings of H2O, but also
aspired to grapple with water and the hydro-social circulation process as the
hybrid fusion and heterogeneous assembling of things human and non-
human. Indeed, the hydraulic techno-natural revolution of Spain’s territo-
rial structure was characterized by historically changing mobilizations of
discursive, symbolic, socioeconomic, and material processes that enrolled
the physical qualities of H2O and engineered the hydro-social constella-
tion to make it act—albeit not always successfully—in a manner adequate
to the dreams and aspirations of its master architects. The assembling of
historically and geographically changing networks of interests shaped and
plied the hydro-social landscape in ways that embodied and reflected the
power geometries and choreographies of the time. The making of Spain’s
hydraulic geography was predicated upon folding and forging a historically
variable scalar geometry that often combined and enmeshed local networks
with national and transnational connectivities. These alliances effectively
marginalized or repressed those who dissented while nurturing the hetero-
geneous interests of those who took an active role in sustaining the existing
networks and power relations.
I excavated first the origins of Spain’s early-twentieth-century modern-
ization process (1890–1930) and the production of a national modernizing
imaginary as expressed in debates and actions around the hydro-social con-
dition. This was a period marked by a desperate attempt to pass through the
trauma of the end of empire and to engage directly with Spain’s troubled
internal socio-ecological conditions. Great dreams and aspirations in a con-
text of mounting political conflict and social struggle in the early decades
of the century culminated in Spain’s first authoritarian regime in the 1920s,
which would lay the foundations for the subsequent decades of radical
change. The prophylactic qualities of nature and nature’s waters would offer
the nexus around which narratives and projects promising redemption,
modernization, and development became articulated. In chapters 5 and 6, I
explored how Spain’s modernization process during Franco’s regime (1939–
1975) became a specific scalar state project, framed around the production
of a concrete techno-natural hydraulic edifice. Here, the focus shifts from
documenting the failures to materialize the early twentieth-century hydro-
modernizing dream to considering how hydro-development became part
of fascism’s postwar vision for a fecund Spain, and how this “wet dream”
was gradually put in place. Indeed, under Franco’s totalitarian rule and with

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 Politicizing Water, Politicizing Natures 225

more than a little help from newly found transatlantic geopolitical friends,
Spain’s socio-ecological configuration was profoundly reengineered. In the
final two chapters, I chronicled the joined process of democratic transition
and transformation of Spain’s hydro-structuralism into a new hydro-social
assemblage that centered on the desalination of seawater for managing
hydro-scarcities. The extraordinary process of rapid democratization after
the demise of fascism and the exuberant cultural and social transforma-
tions that followed also inaugurated a series of new hydro-social imaginar-
ies, discursive practices, and political-ecological conflicts. In this process,
the “old” hydro-social edifice was increasingly contested and reassembled
in new ways, extending the scalar choreography of hydro-social circula-
tion into the sea in parallel with the recalibration of transnational and
global configurations. Technocratic arguments, combined with a discursive
and material reframing of the place and role of water, fused with perva-
sive processes of neoliberalization, intense regional conflict, and mounting
environmental concern. Nonetheless, the ultimate objective remained the
same, namely, determining how to make sure water keeps flowing so that
both economic growth and the associated social and economic claims to
water can be sustained.
Spain’s hydro-social and techno-natural landscapes express simulta-
neously heroic modernizing desires, the legacy of a brutal authoritar-
ian regime, the imprint of the elites’ dreams, and the pain and suffering
of millions of anonymous workers and peasants. It is from within this edi-
fice, in the interstices of often enduring power assemblages, that new socio-
ecological movements, innovative political visions, scalar arrangements,
and alternative socio-technical projects were imagined, debated, framed,
envisaged, and fought for. Along with changing geometries of power, water
was rescripted and reimagined, reflecting transformations in ways of know-
ing, talking, sensing, seeing, and understanding what water is, why and
how it matters, and how it acts.

Understanding Water

The relationship between water in its variegated acting and the nature of
the associated social power relations have been and still are key concerns
of many environmental historians, political scientists, engineers, policy
experts and managers, cultural theorists, geographers, and sociologists,
each foregrounding their particular take on what water is and what it does,
and vying for the importance of their claims to “knowing” the truth about
H2O. The multiple narratives that pattern the stories in this book engage

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 226 Chapter 9

a range of disciplinary perspectives that have been too often enclosed in

different and mutually exclusive disciplinary boundaries and epistemic
communities. I chose not to foreground one particular perspective pulled
from the shelf of available approaches and frameworks. Instead, I let the
narrative do the hard work, as I believe that theory is forged through
the slow work of painstaking research that permits the reconstruction of
the futures of the past. This is not to say that no alternative narratives are
possible or that there are no glaring and even impermissible gaps, silences,
and absences in my work; I could have said more about groundwater, about
the urbanization of water, about floods, about water and pleasure. I chose
not to, hoping that others might walk down these paths. Rather, I intended
to make theory come alive, to show how historical materialism, political
ecology, science and technology studies, environmental justice arguments,
and other materialist perspectives can be put to work and how, through the
hard labor of storytelling, new theoretical insights can emerge.
Despite important differences, the preceding perspectives share a com-
mon theoretical concern that revolves around “why, where, and how does
nature matter politically?” How does the stuff of nature enter the terrain
of public concern and social agency and what does that, in turn, signify
for earthly life, for rendering the socio-ecological predicament we are in
more intelligible, for nurturing a socio-ecologically different, yet just and
equitable, politics of the earth? The argument in this book also inscribes
itself in this concern. The book can be read as a heuristic device that may
provide ideas, insights, connectivities, narrative techniques, and method-
ological pointers for undertaking political ecological analysis in different
historical and geographical contexts, and possibly with a meeting point
other than water.
In an attempt to move away from dualistic interpretations of the rela-
tionship between nature and society, but still insisting on the performative
role of nature’s matter, the flow of the argument here maintained that, while
there is a strong relationship between the changing nature of both state and
society on the one hand and the modes of transforming and producing
new techno-natural arrangements on the other, this relationship is mutu-
ally constituted and coevolves. It is historically and geographically variable
and contingent; intrinsically bound up with often radical and contested
imaginaries, cultural practices, engineering expertise, and shifting political-
ecological power relations. The ultimate outcome of this process cannot
be discerned in advance; it is the result of choreographies of contestation
and paths of struggle. The materiality of the physical environment and
its dynamics do not function primarily as an external given, but rather as

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 Politicizing Water, Politicizing Natures 227

historically constituted, materially and socially coproduced, environments.

It is precisely in and through the contested production of new hydro-social
environments that new forms of state organization and social relations are
forged. Water and its flows are a synecdoche for society as a whole, one that
captures its relative coherence as well as the forces that continuously under-
mine its stability and strive for change and transformation.

Politicizing Environments: Or . . . “Water Does Not Exist!”

While my gaze was firmly focused on Spain and its water, the intellectual
focus of my argument was resolutely fixed on understanding water as a
political category. In doing so, I departed from technocratic and manage-
rial approaches to water issues and inserted water squarely into the terrain
of political conflict and social struggle. Relational and territorial notions
of socio-natural ordering were mobilized in the context of an analysis that
aimed at considering how nature is remade through the fusion of the social,
the technical, and the physical. The political and the technical, the social
and the natural, became mobilized through and etched in spatial arrange-
ments that shaped distinct and multiscalar geographies and landscapes—
landscapes that celebrate the desires of elite networks, reveal the scars
suffered by the disempowered, and nurture the possibilities and dreams for
alternative visions.
The political ambition of the book was to show how socio-ecological
configurations (in this case the hydro-social cycle) become constituted
through a process of convening humans and nonhumans as they become
enrolled in socio-ecological assemblages, and how the dynamics of disas-
sembling and reassembling express shifting imaginaries, dreams, and polit-
ical-economic and social power relations. The focus was on how convening
is inevitably also a process of convoking, and on who or what does the
summoning. Most important, I intended to show how nature’s mobili-
zation is always a question of contentious discursive enchainment, fore-
grounding particular materialities of nature, political contestation, and
socio-environmental struggle. The variegated manners in which nature
can be and is mobilized suggest ultimately that different socio-ecological
constellations are always possible, up for grabs, for the making. What
and how they will be made depends on who or what decides the political
choreographies of their making. The diverse geographies of the world can
and should indeed be understood as the outcome of an intricate socio-
environmental process that perpetually transforms the socio-physical
metabolism of nature. Mobilizing nature, although usually portrayed as

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 228 Chapter 9

a technological and engineering problem is, in fact, as much part of the

politics of life as any other social process. The recognition of this political
meaning of nature is essential if environmental processes are to be com-
bined with just and empowering development.
As I showed throughout the book, nature and its waters do not exist
outside the metonymic chains and social practices that offer some sort of
instable meaning of what nature or water is and around which living envi-
ronments become politicized. There are all manner of environments and
assemblages of socio-natural relations possible and feasible. Nature’s acting
is variegated and heterogeneous, and its shifting discursive presentations or
imaginary representations reflect these heterogeneities. Consider, for exam-
ple, how water can and has been imagined as “good” or “bad”, “just” or
“unjust,” “scarce” or “abundant,” “source of life” or “causing disaster,” “pri-
vate” or “common.” All socio-spatial processes are invariably predicated
upon the circulation, metabolism, and summoning of particular social,
cultural, physical, chemical, or biological processes, and their outcome is
contingent, often unpredictable, and always immensely varied and risky.
These processes produce a series of both enabling and disabling socio-
environmental conditions (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006). Pro-
cesses of metabolic change are, therefore, never socially or ecologically
neutral. The unequal ecologies associated with uneven property relations,
the impoverished socio-ecological life under the overarching sign of com-
modity and money, and the perverse exclusions choreographed by the
dynamics of uneven eco-geographical development at all scales suggest how
the production of socio-ecological arrangements is always a deeply conten-
tious and conflicting, and hence irrevocably political, process. Therefore,
the production of socio-environmental arrangements implies fundamen-
tally political questions, and has to be addressed in political terms.
It is in this sense that I claim, with Slavoj Žižek, that “Nature [and Water]
does not exist!” (Žižek [1992] 2002; Swyngedouw 2010b). For Žižek, any
attempt to stabilize and suture the meaning of nature, to inscribe a particu-
lar set of symbolizations in its name, is a decidedly political gesture. The
disavowal or the refusal to recognize the political character of such ges-
tures, and the attempts to universalize the situated and positioned mean-
ings inscribed metonymically in Nature or Water lead to perverse forms of
depoliticization, to rendering Nature politically mute and socially neutral
(Swyngedouw 2007). It is precisely the recognition of the inherent slip-
periness and multiplicities of meaning suggested by different metonymic
enchainments of really existing things, emotions, and processes that urges
us to consider that perhaps the very concept of nature itself should be

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 Politicizing Water, Politicizing Natures 229

abandoned. This book and many others on related themes indeed have
shown conclusively that nature outside the social and the political does
not exist (Morton 2007; Swyngedouw 2010b). What remains an enigma
nonetheless is how we, both in our everyday life and mundane policies as
well as in hydrological and engineering science communities, continue to
see and act on nature and water as if we do not know this.
The fact that access to and distribution of water is highly uneven is well
known. The articulation of the use and techno-natural transformation of
water with social and political processes in which actors take highly unequal
positions is also well documented. Nonetheless, both popular and scientific
arguments remain predominantly fixed on water as a thing in itself and
on how its variegated natural acting—even if the vital role of humans is
acknowledged—constitute the determinant of our hydro-social condition.
Droughts, water scarcity, hurricanes and floods, river flows and aquifer
dynamics, thirsty lands and cities, technical infrastructures and distribu-
tion systems persist as the privileged entry through which the water conun-
drum is conventionally approached. Despite detailed scientific analysis of
and sophisticated insights into the key social drivers and bottlenecks that
structure the aquatic edifice, the simple fact remains that too many people
still die prematurely or suffer unnecessarily because of water-related condi-
tions that would be relatively easy to remedy had it not been for uneven
power relations and perverse geographies of uneven development. Water
keeps flowing uphill, to money and power.
Although we do really know that water injustices and inequalities cho-
reograph the world’s diverse hydro-social constellations and that struggles
over water intensify, we rarely act on the basis of these insights. It seems
indeed that ideology today functions precisely as the disavowal or foreclo-
sure of what is already known. As Slavoj Žižek puts it: “We know very well
how things are, but still, we act as if we do not know” (Žižek 1989). In a
context of proliferating accumulation by dispossession, of unchecked con-
centration of resources in the hands of the few—often nurtured by manage-
rial objectives that consider the techno-managerial organization of optimal
market forces as the only horizon of the possible—and of rapidly deepen-
ing unequal social, political, and economic power relations, all manner of
socio-ecological struggles that revolve around the signifier of “justice” are
nonetheless actively resisting the often violent appropriation, not only of
water, but also of a wide range of other common-pool resources too. These
struggles, despite their radical heterogeneity, share a concern with a more
equitable and solidarity-based organization of access to and appropriation
and transformation of the commons. They signal how water is indeed thor-
oughly political and politicized.

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 230 Chapter 9

I would like to suggest that opening up the debate over water-as-

commons organized through an egalitarian and therefore democratic
being-in-common (as the form of political organization of the social) might
permit shifting the terrain somewhat from the currently dominant ethical
concern with “justice” and an analytical focus on struggles of resistance to
more directly and openly political visions and imaginaries that might nur-
ture and galvanize politicized struggles aimed at a more egalitarian trans-
formation and collective management of the commons of the earth. Such
a scholarly perspective and situated political position would move away
decidedly from considering water as a predominantly techno-managerial
concern to one that focuses squarely on socio-biological life and well-being.
This, of course, presumes a perspective that does not ignore or disavow
radical contestation, explores mutually exclusive perspectives and imagina-
tions, and acknowledges the profoundly varying social and political power
positions of the interlocutors in the process. Achieving equitable socio-
ecological governance implies a form of democratic politics that includes
considering different political constellations of organizing the hydro-social
cycle. It points inevitably toward a perspective that destabilizes consensus-
based models that can presumably be assessed neutrally on the basis of
scientific validity, efficiency, productivity, and inclusiveness. It is precisely
such a mode of consensual techno-managerial management within an
assumedly undisputed frame of market-led efficiency that reproduces the
existing water inequalities. The water conundrum is indeed an emblematic
issue, one that expresses in its variegated meanderings the functioning of
political democracy, not just as a system of governing, but also as a set of
principles articulated around equality, freedom, and solidarity.
Democratizing environments become, therefore, an issue of enhancing
the democratic content of socio-environmental construction by means of
identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of
social power and a more inclusive mode of producing socio-natures can
be achieved. This requires reclaiming proper democracy and proper dem-
ocratic public spaces (as spaces of agonistic dispute) as a foundation of
and condition for more egalitarian socio-ecological arrangements. This
also requires the naming of positively embodied egali[ber]tarian socio-
ecological futures that are immediately realizable. In other words, produc-
ing egalitarian political-ecologies are about demanding the impossible and
realizing the improbable.

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