Charmaine Chua

This chapter demonstrates how docking - as the process by which maritime
shipping comes to shore – and the processes of port governance associated with docking are crucial forces in the global economy. Given the 80% of international goods moved over sea, ports are not only the gateways by which circulating capital is brought to the marketplace, but
also spaces of state power. This chapter traces how ports have sought to secure their place in global trade through shifting governance structures, focusing on how the mixture of public and private partnerships in port governance results in the rapid expansion of large-scale port
infrastructures on the one hand, and increasing corporatization of port services on the other. The rapid expansion of port capacities in some places and increasing competition to become a logistics hub means that the benefits of port expansion are unevenly distributed depending on
ports’ capacities to develop their infrastructures and services. As a result, it is important to consider the social and political economic consequences of port governance, as ports increasingly adapt their legal and infrastructural apparatuses to compete for a piece of the global logistics pie.

Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect "critical infrastructure" from disruption. However, Indigenous-led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state's escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti-capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti-colonial struggle.

The term disruption has become a buzzword for our times, although there is little clarity over what the term means, how it is deployed, and towards what ends. In order to understand the analytical and political stakes that are embedded in the deployment of 'disruption' as a rationale for various sources of upheaval, in this article I argue that these three terrains of disruption should be understood as theories of governance, and term them 'disruption from above', 'disruption from the middle', and 'disruption from below'. Each terrain of disruption embodies different ethoses, actors, and goals: the first connoting elite-driven creative destruction and innovation; the second obfuscating the capitalist imperative that produces world-systemic upheavals; and the third seeking to expose the structures of violence and inequality built into such practices. I illustrate these three terrains through a structural account that traces the popularity of the disruption discourse from its origins to its material application; analyse an illustrative example of the assetisation of infrastructure and how it bureaucratises governance and shifts relations of power; and conclude by examining infrastructural forms of protest against such forms. I argue that the confusion over what disruption means, who exercises it, and upon whom is not a coincidence: rather, disruption's polysemy is structurally produced as a way to disguise ongoing capitalist crisis as a technical problem that market innovations can solve.

The term logistics-in its droll connotation of the technical aspects of moving, organizing, and distributing supplies-might seem to invite either eye rolls or yawns outside of MBA programs or board rooms. Yet, perhaps precisely because of its seeming banality, since the 1950s the rise of logistical management as a global economic force has escaped the attention of even the most attuned Marxists. Only recently have critical scholars begun to pay attention to logistics in its totality, seeking to understand how logistical systems function to coordinate, capture and control the vicissitudes of daily life. By directly integrating systems of production, transportation, and consumption through cybernetic systems of data management, logistics enmeshes transport infrastructure, ecological systems, commercial and military goods, and the labor that moves them within an extensive system of tracking and tracing, enfolding enlarging circles of territory and sociality within the extractive machine of supply chain capitalism. Along the way, the organization of capital accumulation through logistical systems has also required a corresponding political shift, intersecting with states' interest in sovereign expansion both territorially and technologically.

This chapter examines how logistics functions as a material and social force structuring contemporary capital accumulation through the control and coordination of global systems of circulation. While logistics most broadly refers to acts of banal organization, this chapter argues that the 'logistics revolution' of the 1960s and 70s marks a turning point in regimes of accumulation centered on reshaping the spatial and temporal pathways through which commodity capital circulates. Contemporary logistics collapses the distinction between production, distribution and circulation by calculating total cost across the global supply chain, and by organizing the space and time of production according to just-in-time modes of flexible accumulation. As a response to the falling rate of profit in the industrial North, logistrics restructuring arose out of a systemic tendency for capital to seek new ways to reduce its turnover time, prompting corporate experiments with speeding the realization of the value in the marketplace, and focusing capital's hopes for accumulation in the sphere of circulation. This chapter details the forms of political and capitalist power that accompany the rise of logistics, arguing that it is becoming an increasingly hegemonic logic for structuring the state's production of space and management of labor, organizing these processes according to the accumulative demands of global capital and transnational corporations. Driven by the fantasy of frictionless flow, logistics thus produces jagged and uneven political effects in the service of the state and capital, but which also reveal contradictions and struggles at local points of circulation.

*Note: this version of the article does not reflect the final publication, which was designed and edited by Funambulist editor Leopold Lambert. For a final version and to support this independent publication, you may purchase a copy of the magazine here: http://thefunambulist.net/2016/07/01/object-politics-the-sixth-issue-of-the-funambulist-magazine-now-published/

In this article, I ask how the container as architectural object has become a political infrastructure, creating a calculable system of material processing that has enabled an entire reassessment of how, where, when, and for whom goods are made and moved.

Moving between interlinked storylines of my father’s search for his grandfather’s house in China, and my own vexed relationship to ‘home’ as a Singaporean abroad, this autobiographical essay reflects on what it means to long to belong. I explore belonging as an alternative starting point for a more intimate International Relations that otherwise rarely begins from the perspective of home. In tracing familial cultural history through my father’s return to China and my own hunger for his stories about a bygone Singapore, the essay is not simply an exercise in nostalgia. Rather, I reflect on what is lost in the capitalist and developmental logics that characterize my encounters with ‘home’. In doing so, I attempt to reinvigorate “nostalgia” as a valuable site for thinking through the intimacy of the local, while simultaneously interrogating the dangers of sentimentalizing an authentic homeland. Rather than explicitly theorize these concepts, the narrative autobiographical form of this essay seeks to elicit affective responses to our shared desire for belonging and, in doing so, invites reflection on an International Relations that begins from a place of situated intimacy.

Originally posted at:
http://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/01/05/the-slow-boat-to-china/

The first post in a series of oceanic dispatches. She is currently on a 36-day journey on board a 100,000 ton Evergreen container ship starting in Los Angeles, going across the Pacific Ocean and ending in Taipei.

Originally posted on: http://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/01/19/the-quiet-port-is-logistics-nightmare/

Dispatch #2 from Charmaine’s ethnography of a container ship comes to us from the port of Tacoma, where the ship is currently experiencing severe delays.

Excerpt: There is a massive traffic jam on the ocean, and the Ever Cthulhu is stuck in the thick of it. Already, we have been delayed for almost two weeks: the ship stayed for five days longer than the forecasted two in both Oakland and Los Angeles, and is expected to be in Tacoma for ten. Regularity, it turns out, can no longer be expected in the logistics industry, and my 26-day trip on the Ever Cthulhu is turning into a 40-day one. All along the West Coast, ports and berths have been choked with vessels in every terminal, and waiting ships have crowded into anchorages for days in far higher numbers than the captain has ever seen. Imagine the ripple effects of all this congestion: if a single ship takes six days longer than the usual 2.5 to be unloaded at berth, and ships that have been waiting experience those same delays when their turn at berth arrives, those backlogs reverberate outward in unfathomable ways, affecting ships’ travel times to other ports around the world, trucking rates inland, air freight pricing, rail service delays across the U.S., and the availability of empty containers in China.

Originally published here: http://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/01/27/landlessness-and-the-life-of-seamen/

This post is Part 3 in a series of dispatches posted from a 130, 000 ton container ship.

Excerpt:
Oceanic labour is globalised labour, though this may be banal point to make. More specifically, perhaps, oceanic labour is labour that experiences a sort of double alienation under circulatory capital: while in the classic Marxist formulation, alienation in the space of the factory dispossesses workers of the means of production, workers on container ships are differentiated from this labour pool in that the spaces they occupy are not spaces of production, but of circulation. If in the factory, machines removed the connection or satisfaction workers might have derived from the production of commodities, thus turning labour profoundly abstract, in the logistics circuit, workers are one more step removed. Containers, in their modular, block-like, homogeneous forms, wall off the goods being transported from those bodies transporting them. The container form, then, renders the containerized commodity utterly illegible to the workers charged with guarding and ensuring their movement.

Originally posted here: http://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/01/31/in-non-places-no-one-can-hear-you-cry/

Post 4 in a series of ethnographic notes sent from the Pacific Ocean.

Excerpt:
Flattening produces all objects – even people – as fungible commodities. In a recent article, Cuppini, Frapporti and Pirone have argued  that this subjectivation of people as slaves bears striking similarities to the contemporary logistical mode, which “works to transform the logistics laborer into something like a drudge, and android, a working machine.”  But if logistics flattens bodies, objects, and affects, we must also remember that, as Lisa Lowe argues, “capital has maximized its profits not by rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely through the social production of ‘difference’… marked by race, nation, geographical origin, and gender” (emphasis mine). Markers of identity otherwise regarded as non-economic are, in other words, essential to the structure of capitalism rather than exogenous to it.

Originally posted here:
http://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/02/07/the-chinese-logistical-sublime-and-its-wasted-remains/

Sent from Taipei, the penultimate post in a container ship ethnography.

Excerpt:
Waste is a direct product of the logistical system: produced by it, but also a threat to it. Lean logistical models of Just-In-Time production aim precisely at eliminating waste: under its rubric, anything that is not in motion detracts from the circulationist philosophy of “seamless flow”, and is regarded as refuse. In fact, geographers Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy place waste at the heart of narratives of modernity: Acting as society’s “external margin” – that which it constantly desires to cast out – the problem of waste valorizes “a certain conception of the modern subject” who, in productively and fruitfully mixing his labor with the land, proves himself able to engage and overcome the problem of wastage.

Originally published here: http://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/09/09/logistics-capitalist-circulation-chokepoints/

Three weeks ago, protestors and activists mounted the longest and most successful port blockade of an Israeli ship in history: on August 16 and in solidarity with Palestine, organizers of Block the Boat for Gaza led between two to three thousand protestors in a raucous march toward the port of Oakland. Then on August 17, 18, and 19th, as the Israeli ship Zim Piraeus attempted to unload its goods on U.S. shores, activists continued to form picket lines at the port’s gateways. The port’s longshoremen, continuing International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s long legacy of radical politics, honored the picket and refused to unload the boat not once, but twice. The Zim Piraeus sat impotently on the dock for four days straight. Then, without having unloaded a single container, the ship turned around, and went back to where it came from.

Accessible here: https://thedisorderofthings.com/2016/05/09/logistics-violence-empire-resistance/

This May, The Dissonance of Things switches out British accents for those of the vaguely North American variety, as I serve as host for our sixth podcast on the topic of logistics and its role in the making of military, capitalist, and imperial relations. I’m joined by our very own Laleh Khalili of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the wonderful Deborah Cowen of the University of Toronto. Together, we take a look at the increasing ubiquity and prominence of logistics as a mode for organizing social and spatial life. We discuss how this seemingly banal concern with the movement of goods is actually foundational to contemporary global capitalism and imperialism, reshaping patterns of inequality, undermining labor power, and transforming strategies of governance. We also ask: what might a counter-logistical project look like? What role does logistics play in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles across the globe?