Re-righting Water’s Future with the Master’s Tools?

When Lorde (2003) suggested the master’s house could not be dismantled with the master’s tools, it prompted Le Guin (2004) to ask a series of questions: Are alternative tools to be invented to build our future? What should be unlearned? Must democracy and science also be discarded? Le Guin called the metaphor ‘rich and dangerous’ and was herself unable to answer the questions it raised. At issue was how necessary the radical refashioning of knowledge was for a successful transformation of material reality. Similar questions are also at stake in A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero, which asks whether abstract instruments forged within the logics of capitalism can be successfully deployed against water’s commodification. The book opens with an account of protestors at the World Water Forum in Mexico City shaking water bottles full of coins to denounce water’s commodification and demand it as a human right. Ballestero looks at the everyday labor of water experts, public officials, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, as well as the tools they marshal to contest competing conceptualizations of water – as either a commodity or a human right. This quest takes her not so much to watery sites themselves – like rivers, dams, or lakes – but unexpectedly to removed bureaucratic spaces like offices, meeting rooms, workshops, and computer spreadsheets. Ballestero attends to four technolegal devices as productive ethnographic objects, each materializing water in different ways. For Ballestero, these devices deserve to be gazed at with the same sort of wonder reserved for museum displays. Her approach draws on the old cabinet of wonder (Wunderkammer), which emerged in sixteenth century Europe and juxtaposed various curiosities collected from the far reaches of empire into new assemblages that transformed their meanings. Ballestero’s four devices of formula, index, list, and pact are framed as cabinet curiosities displayed in the pages of her book. By examining a formula used to calculate the price of water, the consumer price index used to secure water’s affordability, a taxonomic list used to undermine the public ownership of water, and citizen pacts used to encourage public care for water, Ballestero shows how these devices (re)materialize water in multiple ways and render water as commodity or human right. Some scholarship has noted the troubling lack of distinction between commodities and human rights. The legal scholar D’Souza (2018) claims: ‘The modern concept of rights owes its birth to that moment when land was transformed into a commodity and hundreds of thousands of people were evicted from the place they called their ‘homeland’’ (p. 5). Ballestero similarly highlights in her text Marx’s (1976) observation that ‘the very Eden of... innate rights’ is found within ‘[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange’ (p. 280).