In reading the McKibben article, I found myself reading it as I do for my creative writing workshops, picking out the language and phrases used to enforce the narrative. As both the Sutcliffe and McKibben articles address infrastructure (energy + transportation), they both take different approaches in describing the underlying framework -- the infrastructure -- of their infrastructures. Sutcliffe goes about describing the progress of street transport by re/searching backwards through time, and by holding the finger on the technological advances finds himself branching off into the resultant [or determinant] forces that move forwards in time. The pure amount of dates in his article set up a rhythm of fact that is adamantly unphysical. McKibben travels through his system of energy by conflating space and scale, wandering through the general to the specific, from the statistic to the anecdote. One of my favorite tip-offs to this was when McKibben mourns the inadequacy to describe scale in English, then proceeds to having "a big lunch," seeing a big dam, and then a "bigger dam". Through this distortion of scale and space [casually strolling from New York to Quebec to Brazil to Arizona] McKibben recognizes the scale-lessness of infrastructure as well as its secrecy ["Brazilian oil lights my lamp more than one hour in each twenty-four"].
How does this then tie into our reading of infrastructure? In Jeanette's lecture a few hours ago, she clearly defines three scales : architecture, urbanism, and infrastructure. She asks at the end that we uproot ourselves and consider situations that exist in all three, but how do we confront [or even comprehend] something that is beyond scale?
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