Logistics Genealogies: a dialogue with Stefano Harney (original) (raw)

States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path (Special issue introduction)

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2019

We can today speak of an established field of critical logistics. Collectively, it made great strides in debunking the neoliberal myth that circulation is essentially born free but everywhere in chains. Instead, we are now at the point where we can recognize that economic circulation is always politically constituted: paraphrasing Polanyi (1944), it takes active work to disembed “free” circulation from the pre-existing ties that would otherwise slow it down. On dropping the assumption—corollary to the notion of the invisible hand—that circulation is a natural state, critical studies of logistics force us to render visible the many hands meddling in the world to make things move. And whereas supply chains outwardly might conjure an image of all-powerful smooth conveyance, recent work along these lines (see Chua et al., 2018) has emphasized how, to paraphrase Gregoire Chamayou (2015: 86–87), this logistical order is highly powerful over long distances but extremely vulnerable up close. If Cowen, borrowing from Lenin, rightly posited that “logistics space is produced through the intensification of both capital circulation and organized violence” (2014: 11), in setting the agenda, critical studies of logistics have tended to focus on those loci where both reached their maximum intensity—the heart, so to speak, of the contemporary logistical order. But many patterns of “routinised ‘action at a distance’” (Amin, 2002: 386) across the globe elude this particular emphasis on intensity. Building on the insights from the logistical turn, this special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space shifts the focus towards the politics of circulation in the margins of supply chain capitalism. It asks: what is the politics of logistics where Amazon doesn’t deliver to the doorstep? To explore this question, the special issue aims to foster an anthropologically informed approach to the politics of circulation. This entails an explicit move to look beyond logistics as a calculative project steered from centers of power towards the universal aspiration to put things into circulation unhindered. This analytical and methodological broadening also entails an empirical shift of focus. Empirically, the eight contributions in this collection explore the politics of circulation in the margins across four continents, ranging from Burmese mountain ranges to Central African savannahs and from failing infrastructure schemes in the Colombian Amazon to marginal West African seaports. Methodologically, the contributions share a commitment to an ethnographic inclination, gearing towards what Gregson (2017) called “logistics at work.” The authors follow unlikely logistics operators as they struggle to make things circulate, attentive to the kinds of social and political relations that these projects of circulation, big and small, engender.