Prologue for The Arts of Logistics

PROLOGUE

Ties That Bind

NOVEMBER 2, 2011. WE ARRIVED at the Port of Oakland in the afternoon, some 25,000 of us having made our way there from a demonstration downtown. The short journey to the waterfront had been set in motion a week earlier when hundreds of cops attacked the Occupy Oakland encampment, soaking the city in tear gas and shooting a protestor in the head. That violence triggered calls for a general strike, and November 2 began as rallies, marches, and flying pickets rumbled across the Bay Area, culminating in the planned blockade. Many who stormed the port that day were wageless or underemployed. Those with jobs skipped them to be there. Teachers called in sick, and students cut class. Longshoremen stood down. Most of us had known the port only from a distance, a backyard logistical landscape that rose into view when driving across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, its gargantuan container cranes briefly jostling for attention with the city’s skyline before fading out of sight and mind. The port was hard to miss but, for all its enormity, easy to forget.

Situated on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay, the Port of Oakland ranks as the fifth largest for container shipping in the United States, though its historical significance for global supply chains far outstrips any current standing on domestic league tables. It was here in the 1960s that the shipping container locked into place as the linchpin of the capitalist world-system, just a stone’s throw from the neighborhoods where Black Panthers were organizing against the police and American empire. Oakland had been a pivotal transport hub since the city’s founding in 1852, serving first as the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad and later, during World War II, as a major site for shipbuilding, the jobs on offer there helping to draw the second wave of the Great Migration for Black Americans westward. The world’s first shipping container crane was installed in Alameda in 1959, though it would be the port next door in Oakland that private capital, conspiring with local and federal government, picked to be the world’s laboratory for containerization. Investment gushed into Oakland’s port in the early 1960s, deepening the harbor, enlarging its berths, and delivering an array of novel equipment for handling shipping containers.

However unassuming these steel boxes may have seemed at first, the innovation’s arrival in Oakland proved to be far more disruptive than anyone could have dreamed, like an Alka-Seltzer tablet dropped into a bottle of Coke. Commercial traffic exploded mid-decade when the American military ramped up its war in Vietnam, turning to Oakland and its intermodal containers for shipping supplies. Between 1965 and 1968, the port’s throughput quadrupled to 1.5 million tons, doubling again the very next year, as cargo ships returning from Southeast Asia began making stops in Japan to fill their empty containers with commodities. By the decade’s end, Oakland was handling as many shipping containers as Europe’s top three ports combined. This early success in the East Bay launched a wave of capital investment that flooded ports up and down the West Coast, from Los Angeles and Long Beach to Seattle and Vancouver. Within decades, containerization would pull the axis of global trade from the Atlantic to the Pacific.²

Few who marched on Oakland’s waterfront that day knew much of this history. But even lacking specifics, we could intuit the port’s social function. Most of us had at least a vague idea that much of what we wore, used, and ate moved through littoral spaces like this one: that these goods arrived to such ports from somewhere overseas where they got made by people working under likely abysmal conditions; that this port connected us to those places and to those people; that these connections manifested as a seemingly unceasing flow of things; that we could cut this flow off by assembling together here in this port; and that the effects of such an action could ripple outward. The Port of Oakland was a common ground through which we could channel our shared discontent. And so, like lava we poured in without resistance, and there our collective presence hardened to ensure there would be no further movement of goods that day. When not wandering a landscape of metal and machinery left idle, we danced on railroad tracks and climbed atop shipping containers. It felt like a day outside of time.

A few years later, in 2014, I moved from Oakland to London for a job. Shortly after arriving in England, a new colleague, learning of my interest in logistics, invited me to join her for a performance staged inside several shipping containers that had been specially installed for the purpose in the city’s former docklands. Sure, I said, motivated less by my enthusiasm for theater than by a need to make friends in my new home. The performance we saw that night left me mystified (you can read about it in Chapter 3), yet even more bewildering was the constellation of world-historical circumstances that had made it possible: the global spread of containerization, the replacement of inner-city docks with vast logistical hinterlands, the industrial decline of overdeveloped capitalist countries offset by supply chains wrapping across the so-called Global South. It was dizzying to ponder.

By then, I was familiar with a range of ways that logistics appears in art, from earnest documentaries that aspire to map supply chains to the ideological symptoms mushrooming in popular culture—think, for instance, of all the shipping containers that saturate superhero films. But what I encountered that evening on the River Thames seemed to be of a different order: the performance was not so much a representation of logistics as it was a repurposing of actual supply chain infrastructure. The shipping containers through which we traipsed were themselves stranded logistical assets converted into means of artistic production. I soon discovered that this performance was not unique and that there were many works of art built from and with transportation technologies. Besides shipping containers, the art world is peppered with freight trucks, gantry cranes, railroad tracks, oil barrels, pipelines, wooden pallets, forklifts, merchant ships, drones, and much else. What’s more, the artistic technique of repurposing tools designed for transporting commodities has a history dating back to at least the 1950s. When considered in isolation, these artworks might seem like novelties or quirks, but when gathered together they cohere into a revelatory infrastructural form that points to commodity circulation as a factor in the shifting history of artistic form. As academics are wont to do, I gave this phenomenon a name: the logistical mode of artistic production.

What follows is a book about contemporary art, but it is also a book about how logistics came to be. The Arts of Logistics has two main tasks: (1) to track how the reorganization of capitalist production through global supply chains has impacted the production of art, and (2) to chart the role that art has played in giving form to the logistical infrastructure that supply chain capitalism relies on today. Some readers might find a book with such intents to be surprising, if not also unnecessary, and have valid reasons for their skepticism. After all, when it comes to logistics, there are unquestionably more pressing topics to address than art, not the least being the consequences of supply chain restructuring for workers globally, the dispossession that results from expanding logistical infrastructures like pipelines on Indigenous lands, or the ecocidal tendencies of the grossly polluting global shipping industry. Without wanting to exaggerate the significance of art to supply chain capitalism, I wrote this book as a contribution to the critical study of logistics, as one attempt among many to assess the costs of building this world-encompassing infrastructure for circulating goods. Art, specifically artworks produced using logistical tools and techniques, has things to tell us about the extent to which supply chains are now embedded in social life.

Recognizing the role that art plays in logistics is not the same as endorsing it. This is because logistics, in my understanding, is something other than the neutral management science for getting things to the right places at the right times that it is so often presumed to be. Rather, logistics constitutes a capitalist infrastructure geared to sustaining profits, regardless of the escalating harm to human and nonhuman life. It has been constructed not to produce the things we need to live, but to scatter their production across vast planetary supply chains. Building on the work of scholars such as Charmaine Chua, Joshua Clover, Deborah Cowen, Stefano Harney, Laleh Khalili, and Fred Moten, I present logistics as inseparable from the violence on which the circulation of capital depends.

The narrative I provide about logistics is less one of flow than of friction. It is a story that highlights how historical logics of racialized dispossession and worker exploitation persist into the present, encoded in logistical infrastructure. Instead of wading into debates about the “value added” by supply chains, this book zeroes in on the losses that capital accumulation demands, which requires beginning, as I do in Chapter 1, with the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. Many of the artworks and performances you will encounter in the following chapters offer opportunities for viewing logistics otherwise, with some providing situated perspectives on the violence inherent to circulation. I chose art as my entry point for studying supply chain capitalism because I am interested in what artworks repurposed from logistical technologies can reveal about the limited horizon for putting this planetary infrastructure to other uses. In this regard, The Arts of Logistics should serve not so much as a handbook for what can be done with logistics but more as a cautionary tale about what is to come should we naively assume there to be liberating affordances baked into capitalist infrastructure, just waiting to be discovered.

I have opened this book by recounting two of the experiences that motivated my research, and that highlight, respectively, the antinomies that bind The Arts of Logistics together: blockade and reconfiguration. Common sense might suggest that the latter term implies an attempt to find other uses in infrastructure beyond its designed purpose, whereas the former reflects a desire to render such infrastructure of no use at all. I return to and trouble these oppositions throughout this book. For now, though, I want to abandon any scholarly pretense of objectivity. As interested as I am in how the world of art is entangled in logistical infrastructure, I have written The Arts of Logistics in solidarity with struggles against supply chain capitalism. From Oakland to London to Ogoniland to Palestine to Shanghai, and with many stops along the way, this book follows the global circuit of capital but always travels with its antagonists.