Introduction

"It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past, rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent."
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

1

The mine dumps across Johannesburg, South Africa, of which there are thousands, bear testimony to the lives and afterlives of mining. The slag heaps index the 1886 discovery gold on the Witwatersrand, the ensuing gold rush, industrialization, the infrastructure of apartheid, where the black body was at once the source of necessary labor and surplus, and de-industrialization that marks the political present.

The physical landscape of Johannesburg, bisected by the gold reef lays bare a psycho-geography that stages a division of labor haunted by apartheid: the gold reef which measures more than 56 km separates the northern, more affluent (and more white) suburbs of Johannesburg — where wealth and capital are concentrated — from the more impoverished (black) South, the site from which labor is extracted. “The relations of production” — the totality of relations and bounds people are obligated to enter into for their survival — are put in relief by the mines and the slag heaps. Indeed, as Marx tells us, these social relationships are involuntary and they structure society’s economic base. The mine dumps—as much as the mines themselves — have shaped and continue to shape the ecological and sociopolitical landscape of the City of Gold, where the racial divide remains despite the promises of 1994. Robert Meister’s assertion that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission “reflects a post-revolutionary conception of justice as something other than a first step toward redistributing the illegitimate gains of past oppression” is important, for the mine dumps themselves bear testimony to another broken promise of 1994: the South African gold mines were never nationalized.

The Smoldering Violences

"The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological—are often not just incremental but exponential, operating as major threat multipliers. They can spur long-term, proliferating conflicts that arise from desperation as the conditions for sustaining life are degraded in ways that the corporate media seldom discuss."
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence

3

The task of historical materialism, wrote Walter Benjamin is to seize “that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it”(Benjamin 1940: 391). But how to find words to narrate a violence that is incremental and unspectacular spectacular which is to say a ‘crisis’ that is not afforded the status of ‘crisis’ for it is smoldering rather than sudden? Indeed, the question becomes, can the minor event arrest—the danger not a moment but an accumulation, its effects “pervasive but elusive.”

Eerily beautiful, the. mine dumps are nonetheless vectors of toxicity. Acid mine drainage pollutes water indefinitely; Uranium seeps into the ground; while silicosis, the result of inhaling silica dust underground killed innumerable miners, dust particles from dumps saturate the air; those who live in settlements constructed on and around mine dumps bemoan a disturbing constellation of ailments ranging from birth defects to skin irritations to lung problems.

Contamination: On Seeing and Detecting

“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag

7

“The trees are full of dust, the grass is full of dust. It will have to rain a lot for the grass to be washed, for the leaves to be washed. It has become the life people are living here: they are living in dust every day.”
Gednezar Dladla, Dust, TB and HIV

8

As a practice of visualization, mapping, has the ability to stage the paradox of what Rob Nixon calls “the long-term emergency" “long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological—that are underrepresented in strategic planning and official memory.” How a map is rendered, its resolution and color, for example, forces us to ask, what does it mean to see, and how does it differ from detecting? What is sensed in the form of asthma, tuberculosis, further comprise of an immune system already compromised by HIV— but not necessarily seen right away, since they result from an accumulation rather than a singular event?

On Seeing

High-resolution imagery from Google Earth, sourced from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Landsat mimics how we “see” the earth . The pixel resolution varies from place to place. Google buys satellite images from SPOT Satellite (and other companies) to get more high res. Therefore when you zoom into a place, the resolution is improved compared to the Landsat 8 imagery. The pixel size or spatial resolution for SPOT can get up to 2.5 meters by 2.5 meters.

On Detecting

Low-resolution Landsat imagery, a “continuously acquired collection of space-based moderate-resolution land remote sensing data” allows for the detection of phenomena that would ordinarily go unseen. Remote sensing is predominantly used in order to map environmental changes which includes but is not limited to fertile agricultural land, geological formations and mineral compositions of soil. The rendering of Landsat imagery can be either be natural or standard false color:

“Each pixel designates 20 square meters—just over 215 square feet. Each one has an address, expressed in longitude and latitude, corresponding to a unique territory on the face of the Earth. And each one has a signature, the heat value of that place at the time the satellite passed silently above. That value is expressed as a number, which in turn has an assigned standard false color. The satellite gathers data— we see an image.”
Laura Kurgen, Close Up at a Distance

13

What emerges from low-resolution imagery in standard-false color is the possibility to detect contamination, whose sociopolitical implications are wide-ranging. Standard false color is a form of language that allows us to detect that which we cannot immediately see.

Money-Waste-Money

“Foundational to the capitalism that built Johannesburg was the belief that black labor pertained to the domains of both need and use. Native life, in turn, was both indispensable and expendable. Because native life was seen as excessive and naturally doomed to self-destruction, it constituted wealth that could be lavishly spent.”
Achille Mbembe, Public Culture

14

Mines are haunted by their finitude, which is to say their eventual depletion. Until 2006, South Africa was largest producer of gold in the world. As of 2016 South African’s Department of Mineral Resources has identified thousands of mines deemed ‘derelict and ownerless’. According to the Chamber of Mines of South Africa, 562,000 times more waste than gold was produced in 2013. In their “Mining Indaba” report of February of 2017, the Chamber of Mines predicts the imminent demise of mining:

"Looked at as a whole, with conventional mining [alongside full-mechanized mining], the industry can look forward to a sharp decline in gold production by 2019-20 and for mining to die out almost completely by 2033."

Once considered the detritus of a lucrative gold mining industry, in the age of global capital, finance capital, and speculation, the mine dumps have emerged as a source of profit. Advances in technology mean that dust can has the potential to be re-mined for precious metals. Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree N. Reddy “contend that “waste” is the political other of capitalist “value”, but in the case of the slag heap, forged is a relationship between surplus-value and waste, where the latter has transformed into the former, at least partially, with the passage of time. Indeed, extracted from a portion of the waste is use-value, which is what drives capitalist production’s drive to accumulate, which is to say generate surplus value. This transformation is mediated by what Achille Mbembe calls “superfluity”, which speaks to “to the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things”. Ironically, risk—the neoliberal calculus of people over profit, has the potential to alleviate environmental dangers. Here, Rosalind Morris’ differentiation between danger and risk is useful. use[s]the term ‘danger…appl[ies] to the actual events afflicting people, and the term risk to its representation in terms of calculable and incalculable probabilities.”

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