Aporias of Mobility: Amazonian Landscapes between Exploration and Engineering Deneb Kozikoski Valereto Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 Ó 2018 Deneb Kozikoski Valereto All rights reserved ABSTRACT Aporias of Mobility: Amazonian Landscapes between Exploration and Engineering Deneb Kozikoski Valereto This dissertation argues that the journeys of naturalists, explorers, intellectuals, and engineers through the Amazon in the second half of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century gave rise to perspectives that challenge foundational assumptions about technology in modern metropolitan centers. Chief among these assumptions are the ideas that technology contributes to specialization, the disenchantment of reality, the entrapment of the subject in the logistics of urban labor, and the removal of natural obstacles. The examination of the roles of nature and technology in texts and images of the period shows that travel and exploration were represented as experiences of enchantment and encounters with impassable terrains. The dissertation focuses on three interconnected cases to support its thesis: Euclides da Cunha’s reading of the naturalists in his essays on the Amazon; experiences and practices of exploration on the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers; and the construction of a railroad along these rivers to render the hauling of vessels over land and long voyages unnecessary. Developing a cultural-historical framework that counters narratives of technological domination and failure, the dissertation concludes that the tensions between exploration and engineering in these cases reveal the eschatological facets of the history of technology. The eschatological facets show both how technologies contribute to the construction of the farthest frontiers and how technologies themselves arrive at their final stages. Table of Contents Acknowledgments……………………………………….……………………………………….......ii List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………..………iii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………….………………1 CHAPTER 1…………………………………….……………………………………………………………...…..32 BETWEEN IMPROVISED GUIDES AND TECHNICAL ENCHANTMENT: THE PARADIGMATIC TRAVELS OF THE NATURALISTS AND EUCLIDES DA CUNHA’S AMAZON i. PAGES OF A MONOGRAPH: THE AMAZON BETWEEN READING AND VISION………………………......39 ii. LENSES OF A THEODOLITE: WRITING AND TECHNICAL ENCHANTMENT……………………………...51 CHAPTER 2…………………………….……………………………………………………………...…………..64 LAND SAILORS OF THE MADEIRA AND MAMORÉ RIVERS AND THE CONQUEST OF THE IMPASSABLE i. APORIAS OF MOBILITY: THE MODERNITY OF THE RUDIMENTARY AND THE OBSOLESCENCE OF THE NEW……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…71 ii. THE RHETORICAL AND VISUAL LANGUAGE OF APORETIC LANDSCAPES……………………………...94 CHAPTER 3…………………………………………………………………………………………………...…113 TROPICS OF ENCHANTMENT: TECHNOLOGIES OF MOBILITY AND LIBERATION IN H. M. TOMLINSON’S OCEANIC VOYAGE TO THE AMAZON i. THE URGE OF THE MACHINERY: PROMETHEAN AND THANATROPIC ENTANGLEMENTS……….…119 ii. BEYOND REGULAR ROUTES AND TIMETABLES: THE NARRATIVE’S SEARCH FOR FORTUNE………128 iii. TECHNICAL ENCHANTMENT AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE STEAMSHIP CAPELLA …...137 CHAPTER 4…………………………………………………………………………………………………...…145 ENGINEERING ESCHATON: CINEMA AND PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE MARGINS OF HISTORY i. ICONIC PORTAGES AND THE OPERA OF FLUVIAL SHIPWRECKS ………………………………………...153 ii. DANA B. MERRILL: PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE ENDS OF THE MADEIRA-MAMORÉ RAILROAD………161 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………….…………………………………..181 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………….……………………………………..186 i Acknowledgements I am profoundly grateful to my professors: Graciela Montaldo, Carlos J. Alonso, and Ronald Briggs. It is a privilege to have my research be shaped and challenged by their teaching, insights, and scholarship. I do not know what will happen to everything I learned in these seven years, but I do know their caring presence in all stages of the writing of this manuscript will always be with me. ii List of Figures 1 Amazonia as a Field of Travel…………………………………………….........……………………8 2 Ascending the Rapids.……………………………………...…………..………………...…….…..70 3 Garitea, or a Traveller’s Canoe, River Madeira……………………..……………………………..83 4 Halt Under a Giant of the Primeval Forest (Madeira)…...………………………………….... 88 5 Pont Sur Le Rio Verde...……………………………………………………………………………97 6 Descending Ribeirao falls, Madeira River, Brazil……………………………...……………….99 7 Descending Ribeirao falls, Madeira River, Brazil……………………………..………………101 8 Der Theotonio-Fall Im Madeira…………………...………………………………………….103 9 Eine der kleineren Schnellen des Caldeirão do Inferno…………...………………………….105 10 Dragging the canoes over a portage by means of ropes and logs…………………………….108 11 Manner of dragging the canoes across a hilly portage………………………………………..110 12 Boot-Transport über Land……………………………………………...……………………..156 13 Views of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira e Mamoré………….………………………………..162 14 Clearing Difficulties………………………………………………………...…………………167 15 Clearing Difficulties………………………………………………...…………………………170 16 Unfinished Wharf, and “Steam Ship Falk”………………………...…………………………172 17 Views of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira e Mamoré…………...………………………………177 iii Introduction If a popular, contemporary, travel guide on the Amazon featuring routes, experiences, and sites of interest is to be compared with the array of naturalist, travel, and exploration narratives that circulated from the second half of the nineteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth, the reader will be nothing short of astounded by the vast territory covered by travelers who did not even dream of airplanes. If scientists and explorers continue to tread paths and adventurously experience Amazonian environments in ways that are necessarily not accessible to the markets of tourism, the logistical, cultural, physical, and technological challenges to mobility in the nineteenth and early twentieth century are yet to be elaborated into a cultural history of mobility and traveling. With the exception of the British naturalists, most of the explorers and engineers who ventured in the Amazon in the nineteenth century remain unknown in the study of travel writing and visual production. With “Amazon” and “Amazonian” I refer to the waters and lands that form the river basin of the Amazon River and its tributaries, as well as to the various ecosystems that are encompassed by its extension over nine nation-states in South America. The Amazon forest, thus, is a large element in the composition of the Amazon but by no means its only form of biological expression. One of the many reasons why this dissertation came into being is the idea that in only getting travelers as far as the navigability of rivers allows, modern means of transportation, technologies of mobility, and the infrastructures that accompany them appear under a very unique light in the texts and images of the figures analyzed in the following chapters. By technologies of mobility, I refer to any means or apparatus used for movement, transportation, and the enhancement of mobility across a terrain. Whether they are successful or not, and what technological efficiency meant to travelers in the Amazon, is to be found out in the pages of the 1 travel narratives examined here. By modern technologies I refer to instruments, skills, and techniques that emerged with mechanical, optic, electric, and thermodynamic sciences from the eighteenth century onward. Technological modernization, on the other hand, describes the co- evolving repercussions of scientific, social, cultural, and technological developments, such as increasing specialization, differentiation between the scientific disciplines, separation between previously intertwined spheres, and the disenchantment of reality. This is the contour of the social diagnosis proposed by Max Weber and extended into a theoretical and critical framework on modernity by Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, three paradigmatic members of the Frankfurt School. My intention in reading a largely Western body of travel accounts and visual production on the Amazon focused on relations between technology, nature, landscape, and the internal rhetorical and aesthetic mechanisms of these primary sources is to show that the experience of Amazonian environments gives rise to representations that challenge the largely metropolitan, urban, and industrial framework used to historically and culturally account for modernity. Weber’s theory that nature is increasingly disenchanted and secularized with the intensification of scientific and technological activities in society is profoundly influential. It informs the work done by the Frankfurt School, and by cultural critics that inherited and reworked this framework of analysis to approach the industrialization and modernization of Latin American nation-states as well as literary and artistic production in this era. The narrative of disenchantment, which includes the notion that technology masters and dominates nature, has not left the conception of the transformations the Amazon undergoes unchanged. This dissertation’s reading of works of travelers, explorers, and engineers who went to the Amazon between the mid- nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth focuses on internal and intertextual 2 elements that suggest another narrative. Crucial to my analysis is the understanding I share with sociologist of religion Bronislaw Szerszynski, who argues that, “Both those who see modern rationality and technology