Ned Rossiter
Copper conducts. Not just a metallic alloy with high thermal and electrical conductivity, copper also generates powerful political and social discourses of industrialization and economic nationalism. Copper orchestrates imaginaries of modernity, which emanate from its material presence in the social and economic lives of peoples, nations, empires and transcontinental circuits of trade. Indeed, in countries such as Chile where copper has been central to both economic prosperity and experiments in government from cybernetic socialism to brutal dictatorship, the spectral qualities of this lustrous metal condition an epoch of copper modernity fused with capital accumulation. The materiality of copper, in short, holds an intrusive force that shapes both political regimes and social conditions. To the extent that copper commands a response, whether as a commodity object or symbol of capitalist futurity, one can attribute to this metallic form an organizing capacity of mediation beyond media.
How to cast copper as a prism through which to analyse and conceive the organization of contemporary geopolitics is one of the chief methodological and theoretical curiosities motivating the inquiry of this essay. Of course copper does not have a determining or unilinear effect. Nonetheless, we can attribute to copper a catalysing potential in the organization of society, economy and environment according to the contexts and systems in which it is situated. As both imaginary and material object, copper precipitates a multiplicity of organizational endeavours supported by a range of technologies and techniques. From the extraction machines that mine the earth to blockchain technologies that guard against the ‘trade financing’ of metals using fake paper certificates, copper is a form of elemental media key to the organization of logistical worlds.
Chile is central to the global story of copper. In 1960 the country generated approximately 10 per cent of the world’s supply of copper. Although substantially down from the 1960s, since the mid-1990s copper has comprised approximately 10 per cent of Chile’s GDP and half of its exports. As a key source of employment, the copper mining sector bound Chilean politics and society to national imaginaries of economic development and industrial modernization. Within political discourses of Chilean modernity, class and state formation held a dependency relation with copper as an exploitable resource and commodity to traffic in the capitalist world system. By 2001, after nearly a decade since the advent of the World Wide Web and expansion of the Internet coupled with continued growth in China’s economy, Chile’s share of copper on world markets had risen to 35 per cent. From 2011–15, however, the IMF reported that copper prices had decreased by 40 per cent with further pressures on prices expected as China enters a period of growth slowdown. Such a trend corresponds with what IMF economists term ‘the end of the commodity supercycle’.
Copper mine, Chile. Photograph by Ned Rossiter, 2017.
Prior to extraction as a copper sulphide, and before it finds its way into data storage devices and transmissions systems, copper exists as an elemental metal form. While China has adopted the strategy of extracting subproducts from sulphuric acid contaminants used in the smelting process and then hoarding copper in a concentrate form as a parameter in price setting in financial markets, Chile’s mining sector has been forced to generate value beyond producing cathodes with high purity levels. The process of neoliberal organizational reform stretches back to the mid-1970s with the dictatorship years of the Pinochet regime, which set out to weaken union power in the sector through increased competitiveness achieved by downsizing the labour force and expanding the number of contract workers, outsourcing services in health and education, and further mechanization of production processes. The state-owned mining company, CODELCO, bore the brunt of these interventions. Additional pressures stemmed from government concessions opened to multinational corporations, which resulted in state and private companies often competing for the same lode in adjacent mining sites.
Chile’s copper mines in the early twenty-first century function as a test bed of futurity, indexing a transition from a resource economy to data economies. In recent years China’s lower production costs brought about by modern refineries and cheaper labour regimes have prompted Chile to offset declining revenue and its higher cost of labour by reducing production and obtaining efficiencies from supply chain management, ongoing labour reform and increased automation within mining processes and logistical organization. An example of this can be seen in the partnership between CODELCO and the University of Chile’s Centre for Mathematical Modelling in Santiago, who are developing ‘smart mining’ technologies using robotics, mathematical and computational modelling techniques, and machines equipped with sensor devices for real-time monitoring of production, labour, seismic activity, ambient temperatures inside the mines and air contamination levels. Despite these efforts to secure new lines of value from production processes, copper remains one of the most volatile metals in terms of its price on financial markets. Like any natural resource, the economic horizon of the copper mining industry is finite. Certainly the research focus of entities like the Centre for Mathematical Modelling has direct implications for prolonging the viability of the mining industry within an economy of depletion. However, such efforts are also indicative of a shift from Chilean modernity predicated on copper to a logistical futurity refined by technologies of precision.
Copper belongs to a raft of commodities in futures markets such as the London Metal Exchange (LME) and the Shanghai Futures Exchange. Founded in 1877 and acquired in 2012 by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, the LME began trading with copper before expanding to include other industrial and precious metals such as zinc, aluminium, gold and silver. Copper ushered into the twenty-first century as a metal whose market value increased by 80 per cent, around three times the value it held in the final years of the preceding century. This escalation in price coincided with the commodities boom in the mid-2000s when oil prices surged and the housing bubble had collapsed. During this period domestic demand for copper rose fivefold in China for construction, electricity networks and infrastructure. The broader geopolitical context was marked by the onset of what many commentators refer to as ‘the Chinese Century’. Copper has not been immune from China-led globalization and in recent years has attracted an artificially designed scarcity value in the form of hoarding. Stored as copper concentrate powder in state-owned bonded warehouses located in the port of Qingdao, the technique of withholding product from trade resulted in surges in derivatives transactions on the world metals markets. Exemptions from customs duties and multiple sales of the same stock secured with the exchange of forged warehouse receipts are two key policy devices and commercial practices that instantiate a financialization of metal made abstract. Here, and similar to what we found in the ports of Piraeus and Haldia, the medium of paper governs transactions in futures markets, replacing the movement of metal and accumulation of actually existing inventory.
As an elemental metal, copper invites spectrum thinking: from the neuronal networks of the brain to the metabolic system of the body and its organs, from holes bored into the ground to stockpiling copper concentrate in China’s warehouses, from cables of empire to electronic waste industries and the cultivation of soils with toxic contaminants. As an analytical device, copper has a multiplying capacity, bringing otherwise asynchronous conditions, practices and events into relation. In this regard, copper serves as an element within what Reinhold Martin calls ‘a system of bridging’, where not only physical or material connections are made, but also cognitive relations are conditioned as a complex of ‘infrastructural mediation’. The ensemble of relations of metallic resource, machines, labour, state formation, global economies and finance capital, and prevailing ideologies and imaginaries all exist in a kind of recursive feedback loop, with each element playing back upon and constituting the symbolic and experiential lifeworlds, even the material and ontological conditions that comprise the limits of the system at any particular historical conjuncture.
The materiality that ties the imaginary of copper to the perceptual synapses of the brain is distinct from the physical properties of this metal and its alloys. As a trace element in tissues of the body, copper is required for neurological functions and the nervous system. The medical treatment of copper-induced neurological disorders strives to return the body to a system of equilibrium. Restoring copper balance in the body guards against disease and neurological degeneration. Excess copper in the brain, liver or intestinal organs can result in copper toxicity, which is implicated in numerous neurodegenerative conditions and metabolism disorders such as Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease and Wilson disease. A deficiency in copper absorption, by contrast, can result in coeliac disease, Menkes disease and dementia. These biochemical abnormalities are understood within the medical sciences as ‘copper transport diseases’ encoded into genetic mechanisms.
The metaphor of transportation overlaps here with earlier models of communication, which for centuries bound the transmission of symbols with technologies and infrastructure of movement. A decoupling of communication and transportation technologies occurred, as famously and somewhat controversially argued by James Carey, with the advent of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, which ‘freed communication from the constraints of geography’. Time and space became reorganized and invested with new territories of power in the form of colonial empires. With the ongoing miniaturization of technology in recent decades, signal systems have again conjoined with transportation. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips with copper antenna are embedded in fashion garments and shipping containers, while digital wristbands track anxious bodies in motion and measure the productivity of workers in warehouses, factories and offices. Sensor devices are increasingly littered across urban settings. Movement is now calibrated according to key performance indicators (KPIs). Copper is both a signal and conduit of transmission, regardless of scale.
Such a condition or state of existence is vastly different from the role of copper in the organization of capital accumulation and technologies of mediation, where excess is optimized as either a standing reserve or amplification of signal. With a scalar switch from the molecular level of the body and brain to industrial techniques of extraction and economies of speculation, copper extends its propensity to effect the organization of systems and conditions in the world.
Across this sketch of developments and histories, copper per se is not a tool, but it is nonetheless an object shaped by organizational and technical processes that define social and economic imaginaries, transform bodies and extend our sensory perception. In this regard copper can be understood as a technology. The many devices, objects and infrastructures of which copper is a component part hold their own mediating properties and capacities. Yet no matter how much we may wish otherwise, objects do not speak. Even if they possess forms of what Katherine Hayles terms ‘nonconscious cognition’, objects remain elusive. While materiality is often operationalized within our idioms of intelligibility – whether through classification, modification, abstraction and so forth – there nonetheless remains at a certain ontological level a stubborn refusal to inculcation.
How, then, to tune in to the silence of objects that is nonetheless underscored by the potential for force with transformative effects upon and within the world, on human subjectivity and ecological life? In recent years there has been a methodological predilection across the social sciences and humanities to ‘follow the thing’, as though revealing the movement and action of objects across networks lends an ontological substance brought about through the attribution of relations. There is undoubtedly some value in such a pursuit, but how to discern the hierarchy of relations – the politics – without succumbing to the depoliticized logic of ‘flat ontologies’ that prevails within the Latourian turn to assemblage theory? The history of copper modernity in Chile demonstrates that objects are never neutral. An elemental object as multivalent as copper traffics in confrontation.
In his essay, ‘Towards an Ontology of Media’, Friedrich Kittler maintains that the Aristotelian attention to matter and form neglects the relation of things to time and space. Perhaps buried in this insight of mediation between things, and thus organization, are the components for a critique of power and the techniques by which it operates through technologies of empire. Integrated into computer hardware and cable infrastructure, copper is an elemental media that also signals a regressive turn in making the Internet accessible to the Western world. In places where copper as infrastructure is absent, the leap to wireless and fibre optics can be made more easily. Copper can take us back to the Greeks, and it can turn us into ‘German media theorists’. But above all else copper is elementary for colonialism. Copper is not an enabler, much in the same way that gold is not. Copper is a hoarder. It stores. And it switches and distributes.
* A longer version of this essay was published in Timon Beyes, Robin Holt and Claus Pias (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology and Organization Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).