Institute for Culture and Society Seminar Series

Professor Brett Neilson, Institute for Culture and Society Operations of the Global: Logistics, Norms and the Frontiers of Capital'

Abstract: What kind of power is manifest in logistical practices? Historically logistics was one of the three arts of war alongside strategy and tactics. But it has largely been neglected in contemporary cultural and social debates about transformations of economy and politics. Likewise accounts of globalization have emphasized issues of flow, friction, scale and connectivity but have often sidelined material investigations into the operative dimensions of the global.

Focusing on the workings of software-driven supply chains and drawing on empirical research conducted in Shanghai, Kolkata and Sydney, this paper argues that an attention to logistical practices allows a rethinking of the global production of time and space in relation to issues of labour, law and accumulation. A central claim is that logistics organizes life in adaptive ways that both theories of centralized sovereignty and theories of dispersed governmentality struggle to describe or explain. Professor Ned Rossiter, School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Institute for Culture and Society Logistical Worlds: Command and Control, Exodus and Invention Abstract The unruly worker, the software glitch, willful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal, traffic gridlock, inventory blowouts, customs zealots, flash strikes, protocological conflicts and proliferating standards. Disruption generates logistical nightmares for the smooth-world operations of ‘supply-chain capitalism’ (Tsing).

Contingency prompts control to reroute distribution channels and outsource labour to more business friendly client-states and corporations. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software parameters are adjusted to calibrate KPIs in ways that demonstrate enhanced productivity and economic efficiencies. Peasants revolt across IT special economic zones in West Bengal and the infrastructural transformation of farming land comes to a grinding halt. Global architectural firms export Chinese visions of high-speed economies coupled with new world urban integration and social utopias. Shipping container yards and warehouses coordinate the movement of people and things through technologies of remote-control. Wharf-side loading and unloading of cargo becomes increasingly automated with labour displaced by algorithmic tracking devices and human oversight of machine-operations.