Looking at the “Infra” of Infrastructure

Suspicion circulates freely throughout Lydia Millet's fiction. In the middle of her 2011 environmental-quasi-detective-novel Ghost Lights, the narrator explains that Hal, the protagonist, was "finding it hard to relinquish his doubt. To get past his own skepticism that this was real — the vast boat, the gunmen — he had to remind himself he did not need it to be real."1 By this point of the novel, Hal has uncovered his wife's infidelity, reignited a fight with his daughter, petulantly taken off to Belize to investigate the disappearance of his wife's boss, and met weapons contractors who subsequently called in favors with the NATO forces to convert the personal investigation into a state matter. Hal momentarily sees himself as a node in global systems of sovereignty, finance, and environment, though he also metafictionally understands the mediation of his experience. These are systems, after all, and individuals like him only affect systems in fiction.

Of course, Hal is a character and the events happening to him are fictional. Ghost Lights is the second in a trilogy of novels centering a reformed real estate developer known as T. The dominant affect represented in Ghost Lights is suspicion. Is Hal's wife cheating on him? Is T. dead or just evading taxes? Will the US Government help in this investigation or is the couple he met leading him on? Does T. have a newfound environmental consciousness or is he unhealthy? Hal's suspicion reveals itself through mediated understanding, and in this way recalls and inverts the kind of suspicion Amitav Ghosh attributes to those who live through extreme weather events: "if this were in a novel, no one would believe it."2 Where Ghosh sees the events of the real world overwhelming the structures of realist fiction, the narrator of Ghost Lights considers the mapping and impacting of global structures as too abstract a project for lived experience.

Suspicion is affectively ambivalent. As Ghosh explains in his novel theory of climate change, it is often regressively aimed at narrative representations of extreme weather events. At the same time, it is progressively leveraged against corporate solutions to climate catastrophe — zoning laws, carbon capture, green energy — illuminating the subsumption of environmental language by capital. Millet's corpus of fiction, with Ghost Lights as my focus in this essay, enacts this ambivalence by identifying infrastructures of circulation as places that ought to arouse our suspicions.

Ghost Lights understands the environmental humanities as at least partially engaged with dulling suspicion's edge. One of the most towering figures in the field, after all, is Bruno Latour, whose "Why Critique has Run Out of Steam," argues that suspicion as an affect has been subsumed by capital in service of mystifying the scientific consensus behind climate change.3 And, while there is substantial scientific consensus behind the causes of climate change, the variability of climate models raises even more "skepticism of the non-expert" and invites "a mixture of information and doubt, faith and fatalism."4 This point is only more evident in the wake of antivax conspiracies spawned after the onset of COVID-19, or slightly earlier, with the ever-vigilant, ever-suspicious QAnon crowd's elaborate hermeneutic project.

It is difficult to work on climate change and not at least consider whether critique has, in fact, run out of steam. In early 2023, Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published a report on what ExxonMobil knew about their impact on climate change and how early they had produced accurate research.5 The report claimed that the company was aware of research findings about their effects on climate change as early as 1977, and that this research had been accurate 64-83% of the time. As one of the most powerful companies on the planet employing teams of scientists with the goal of protecting its position, of course ExxonMobil knew this information, and of course they buried that information. On hearing this, I felt jaded. I already knew that ExxonMobil knew; this project was actually a follow-up on a previous report about how long ExxonMobil had known about climate change and to what degree. How would this research help fight the wildfires destroying the western United States? When news came out about the creation of another new heat-absorbing white paint,6 it was hard not to doubt the utility and efficacy of such a technocratic solution. Suspicion is a tool used by the powerful to immobilize revolution-fomenting certainty.

Ghost Lights explores the layered discursivity of suspicious environmentalism. The novel untangles progressive and regressive uses of suspicion by representing the relationships of individuals to the systems in which they participate, willingly and unwillingly. Who mobilizes suspicion and who is its target? How does that engender or inhibit action? The novel begins with Hal setting up outside of his wife Susan's office in an attempt to confirm her infidelity. Looking through binoculars from his car into his wife's office, he thinks, "he could be a birdwatcher. He had always thought there was something furtive about birdwatchers, mainly the ones who kept 'life lists' — something voyeuristic and calculating in how they observed and catalogued their quarry."7 Hal's model for suspicion gets indexed here as furtive voyeurism, which he is critical of even as he actively and furtively "observe[s]" and "catalogue[s]" his "quarry." Birding, in fact, is one of the most identifiable modes of nature conservationism, from Audubon to the present. Environmental aims are naturalized as suspicious here, specifically by Hal's peeping Tom mission becoming a conscious imitation of bird watchers.

Hal is one character in a complex plot sustaining three novels, though, and while he is suspicious of his wife (and birdwatchers, too), he is also trying to identify his own position in the plot. Ghost Lights is first about Hal's search for T., and secondly about his attempt to reckon with what he finds: a healthy T. living reclusively on an island. As a hinge between the introduction and conclusion of the trilogy, the novel plots the circulation of individuals among the systems it documents, illustrating suspicion's positive and negative effects on environmental epistemologies.

The series begins in How the Dead Dream with its protagonist T., who is a character seemingly emerging from the stock of Ayn Rand archetypes. He comes from a middle-class family supportive of his childhood entrepreneurial endeavors like lemonade stands and Ponzi schemes. One evening, while driving home from a property he is developing, T. hits and kills a coyote in the desert. This accident is the inciting incident of the series and sparks T.'s obsession with the natural world. This new obsession conflicts with his career as a successful real estate developer, and through this conflict Millet traces how finance incentivizes the exploitation of environmental resources. How the Dead Dream ends when T. travels to oversee the construction of an island resort in Belize. While there, he hires a guide to show him a local island; the guide dies and T. gets lost in the jungle. In the novel's last pages, T. is lying next to a tapir in the middle of a storm with no prospects of getting out.

This is where Ghost Lights picks up. Susan, Hal's wife, works for T. and is distraught by his disappearance. She sends Hal to investigate, inaugurating the series' adoption of detective fiction, which Brian McHale calls "the epistemological genre par excellence."8 If detective novels are about what we know and how we know it, Ghost Lights' form perfectly aligns with the goal of exploring the role of suspicion in building environmental knowledge. However, Ghost Lights doesn't end with the resolution of Hal's investigation.

It turns out that T. survived the storm and has been living at the site of his unfinished resort, slowly disassembling all that was built and throwing the detritus in the ocean in an attempt to build an artificial reef. This resolution arrives about half way through the book, and the remaining pages document how thoroughly suspicion has permeated Hal's consciousness: he continually thinks he's "paranoid" and should "seek help";9 believes "he should not think too much. As a rule he set too much store by thinking";10 has "the suspicion the whole place was fake";11 "finds it hard to relinquish his doubt";12 and cannot seem to "take it lightly" or to "suspend his judgment."13 The conclusion of Ghost Lights shows Hal increasingly inebriated and framing suspicion as a normative affect that must be overcome in the world of the novel.

Initially, Hal's struggle to abandon suspicion pays off. He meets a nice German couple, Hans and Gretel (which he half-suspects is a joke), who consult for NATO and who subsequently call in a NATO task force to help Hal in his investigation.14 He has a fulfilling affair with Gretel. He finds T. and is eventually converted into helping him renounce his wealth, which in turn helps initiate the reunification process with his wife. It seems, at least in this entry in the trilogy, that suspicion is what blocks characters from achieving their personal goals.

The other characters of Ghost Lights are frequently cynical about the geopolitical systems at play, illustrating an all-knowing attitude. When Hal meets a bomber pilot—one of the pilots called in to bomb "guerilla encampments" after NATO's search for Hal—at a party and asks whether he feels guilty for murdering innocent citizens, the pilot responds by bluntly claiming "we all kill" pointing out how many people need food, water, or other life-sustaining resources "more than you do and die for a lack of a pound of corn . . . we take it all. A quarter of the world's resources for what, five percent of its population."15 The pilot knows how the system works, he knows his own position in the system, and he attempts to alleviate Hal's suspicion of empire by equating bombing people with participating in global supply chains. Hal is drunk at the party, trying to see the world as it is and not through his lens of skepticism, and he accepts the pilot's abstract description of personal culpability as an outcome of systemic compulsion.

Throughout the novel, Hal tries to articulate his suspicion about the military bombings by connecting them to the expulsion of indigenous Guatemalans. He tells Gretel, "Over the border is Guatemala, right? And if it's the Mayans, they're probably escaping a fucking massacre! . . . You haven't read about this? There was a genocide going on, a couple of years ago. Civil War. All this shit with the CIA Propping up the military there."16 No one listens to him, though; his only importance is as a node connecting military forces with a plausible mission in Belize. By not further observing how neoliberal humanitarian structures of peacekeeping and economic development uphold genocides, he accidentally facilitates the bombing of the camp.

Just as the novel tracks Hal's circulation through the plot, it also tracks the circulation of natural resources. Circulation is the focal point of the geopolitical systems at play in the novel, or maybe the dispersal of focal points. Investment in supply chain management over the past fifty years has emphasized maximizing the accumulation of capital through obsessing over the efficiency of how money, commodities, and resources flow. Supply chain management, an area of study in many business schools, "entails managing the flow of materials, finances, information and labor from product or service design to customer delivery."17 In How the Dead Dream, T., as a real estate magnate, guides our readerly attention through complex supply chain issues, such as when he wrestles with environmental protection laws that disrupt the delivery of construction materials to his subdivision development in the Mojave Desert.18

Circulation pervades the novel's thought. It is no accident that T. is a real estate developer, placing him between the capital that funds his investments and the workers who construct the developments. He purchases land, razes whatever is in his way, redirects the resources needed to sustain living and office work, and sells the developments off at a profit. T.'s job is to manage the logistics of making investors' money make more money. He has to get water, roads, and electricity to the sites, despite the deforestation, pollution, and permanent damage he does to the habitats of endangered species.

As T.'s priorities change, however, so do his logistical priorities. He negotiates how much land can be set aside to provide a hospitable habitat for endangered lizards. He manages restrictions on freshwater infrastructure for his island development. Ultimately, he dismantles a development to build a sea wall to mitigate the climate change his construction has exacerbated. His early success attunes him to the fiction of circulations frictionless and allows him to identify his role in its facilitation.

The logistics revolution of the 1970s, tied to just-in-time production schedules and the wide adoption of containerization as a means of storing and transporting goods, focused on making circulation more efficient. The flow is managed through logistics, or what Charmaine Chua defines as "a form of economic calculation that manages capital circulation in the totality of its system and a coordinated yet dispersed set of regulations, calculative arrangements, and technical procedures that render certain objects or flows governable."19 These "regulations," "arrangements," and "procedures" that make "objects or flows governable" happen at the level of infrastructure. Although Infrastructure is notoriously difficult to define, Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins, and Sophia Beal helpfully describe it as "the innards of a structure that are hidden by the structure's surface or facade."20 What contemporary economic ideas about  logistics reveal, then, is the attempt to naturalize the flow of resources and commodities from often peripheral points of extraction into early-industrialized core economies, especially through physical and governmental structures, thus obscuring points of entry, friction, or exit. What Millet's novel wants to do, then, is to interrogate the "infra" of "infrastructure."

Throughout Ghost Lights, Hal repeatedly butts up against the obscurity of these structures. When the Germans call in the NATO air force, which uses the occasion to cluster-bomb guerilla encampments in the jungles, Hal doesn't see his own role in perpetuating the destruction of the environment (one that T., as he has learned, is trying to protect). Even as characters, such as T., Hans, and Gretel explicitly map out larger structures for Hal and us as readers, Hal cannot seem to perceive his role in facilitating the ecocidal (infra)structures of logistics.

So, we have the management of infrastructure through a revolution in logistics aimed at maximizing profit accumulation through efficient circulation. That we can't openly see these structures should make us suspicious. We should also be suspicious of the management structures that undergird supply-chain logistics, in which managers frequently oversee only a single facet of a complicated, interconnected system. When the pilot tells Hal that all Americans are murderous, whether they are bombing jungles or eating food, the naturalization of that process should alert Hal to his own facilitation of such systems. If, as Jasper Bernes argues, "the totality of the logistics system belongs to capital,"21 then identifying the points in the system where individuals can intervene — the choke points — becomes a crucial way to reveal the system's unnatural foundation.

These concluding scenes of Ghost Lights — Hal's conversation with the pilot as well as his subsequent murder — redirect our environmental suspicion to the totalizing object of economic power (circulation), its logic (logistics), and its structures (infrastructure). These scenes show that knowledge of the system in part only serves to immobilize individual actors, and that sustained suspicion of how these structures work moves the actors from passive participants into revolutionary actors like T.

Hal is less able to make the transition than T., though. While not playing as an amateur detective, Hal's day job is with the IRS. Like T.'s job as a developer, this places Hal as the facilitator of other's money: notably, money from US citizens to the US government, which proceeds to cluster bomb Belizean jungles in the novel. Unlike T., Hal doesn't recognize his role in this facilitation. Hal, who relates to the world largely through generic tropes like film noir, sees fiction as the only place where systems can be impacted by individuals. Knowledge of US empire's violence doesn't stop him from asking for military help finding T., because he doesn't imagine himself as the kind of protagonist who causes events.  Where T. looks suspiciously at these structures until he finds his intersection with infrastructural chokepoints, Hal fails to do so. And T. lives through his ambiguous ending, while Hal does not.

While moving beyond suspicion helps Hal's personal life, it makes him personally culpable in systemic violence he could have avoided. When discussing ExxonMobil's climate research earlier, I also voiced suspicion of a new discovery in climate-mitigating white paint. The heat-abating property in this paint comes from a compound called barium-sulfate, which allows it to reflect over 98% of light that hits it. A key component of barium-sulfate is barium-barite, which is the leading mineral extracted from Belize. Importantly, lead leaching can be a significant side effect of barium-barite mining operations. In Ghost Lights, upon immediately upon seeing the boy who stabs him, Hal wonders whether the boy has developmental disorders caused by lead poisoning (although from leaded gasoline, rather than directly from barium-barite extraction). Infrastructure connects capital to environmental destruction to imperial violence.22

In fact, the conclusion of Ghost Lights reenacts the ambiguous ending of How the Dead Dream, except we find out that whereas T. lived, Hal dies. In echoing the first novel's ambiguity with the difference of a determinative death, Ghost Lights emphasizes the distance between Hal's perception of the world and the systems in which we see him partaking. After being stabbed repeatedly in the streets of Belize, Hal immediately abstracts the perpetrator to a symptom of imperial systems: "Not that Hal himself was personally responsible for the lead in the gasoline of this foreign country, but in the sense that they all were, that individuals were culpable, especially individuals like him, secure and comfortable and well-educated."23 With this move, Millet redirects attention away from plot questions — is T. okay? Who are these Germans and why are they helping Hal? Will Hal recuperate his relationships with his wife and daughter — into questions about where individuals can most effectively impact the systems circulating them through the plot.

Did the NATO forces bomb the Belizean jungle to protect the claims of US corporations? Did the mining and extraction of resources damage the community around them? Could the development of a seemingly miraculous, climate-saving paint actually lead to increased policing of these property rights? We don't know, because Hal is dedicated to drinking himself free from his suspicions. Instead of redirecting his critical attention to his own position in relation to imperial circulation, Hal joins his knowledge of systems with his postcritical attitude, further naturalizing the systems he sometimes inadvertently and sometimes deliberately exacerbates.

So what of the ambivalences of suspicion and environmental epistemologies? Reading Millet's novel helps us map spaces where suspicion moves us from inaction to taking action against continued environmental destruction. T. and Hal both work to create community across national and class boundaries, but only T. levels suspicion at his role in the extraction and circulation of natural resources. In Mute Compulsion, Soren Mau identifies logistics, or the mapping of infrastructures of circulation, as one of the sites where economic power is most concentrated: "if capital needs to be mobile, it needs an infrastructure."24 By showing how Hal circulates through the plot of Ghost Lights and actively facilitating environmental devastation caused by capital, the novel illustrates the continued utility of suspicion and proposes infrastructure as a place to materially ground that suspicion.

Who gets to leverage suspicion overlaps with who controls the systems facilitating capital and power, which in turn are systems perpetuating environmental and climate catastrophe. This indeed explains how T., the real estate magnate, can leverage his suspicions toward practical ends, whereas Hal, as a sort of narrative middle manager, becomes further entwined in a system he can only partially understand and control. Environmental scholars are increasingly attentive to mapping these structures, identifying points of friction as the goal of environmental humanities research. Degrowth proponents like Kohei Saito are actively exploring how to represent the competing thresholds of capital and nature, showing how circulation infrastructures obscure this rift in metabolism by temporally and spatially displacing its effects. Jennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature "read[s] the environment" to explore how "assumptions about what nature is are mutually constituted with contests over how it is used."25 Wenzel offers important thinking about how discourses about nature aid obscure nature-killing infrastructures. Kelly M. Rich, Nicole M. Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger examine how infrastructure increasingly has become legible in our "bodies, habits, sensoria, aesthetic categories, health, communities, labor, environments, politics and identities."26 Suspicion is a crucial tool in investigating infrastructure's effect on the environment and contribution to climate catastrophe.

While Hal believes that these systems and infrastructures work outside of individual facilitation, his contrast with T. illustrates the importance of extending suspicion to one's own role in the world and illuminating the infrastructural friction one encounters as actors in the world. The novel ends with Hal's thoughts as he dies: "He was part of the world's momentum, part of its on-and-on-functioning, its inertia that was never ending."27 As he fades away, he accepts his participation in the circulation of imperial and ecological violence.

Ghost Lights represents the ambivalences of suspicion as a mode of promoting environmental action and proposes circulatory infrastructure as productive sites for suspicion. When used to cognitively map and identify chokepoints, perhaps suspicion can move subjects from passivity into knowledge building and, eventually, action. When not materially grounded, however, such suspicion serves the status quo. Millet's oeuvre at large disentangles how suspicion aids or obstructs the work of ensuring an equitably habitable planet, from this trilogy to her 2024 "memoir" We Loved it All, which explains how personal desire overwhelmed systemic understanding of climate systems through the narrator's analeptic, or flashback, style. As information becomes increasingly overwhelming and narrative explanations attempt to account for this increasing information, Millet's work directs our attention to the insides of the structures overwhelming us, thus inviting us to identify the roles we all play in maintaining them.

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Steven Watts (Twitter, @stevenwatts; Bluesky, @stevenwatts.bsky.social) is an assistant professor at Mount Marty University. His writing on literature and the environment can be read at Post45, ASAP/J, and C21 Literature.

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