Operative Glossary

Conceptual sketches and tools formulated and used throughout this research.

Logistical arrhythmia
Logistics doesn’t eliminate time, it displaces and modulates it. The cost of cheap goods delivered quickly is, of course, exploited workers. One way to think about this is through rhythm and tempo, or polyrhythm and arrhythmia. The economy that logistics produces, one of global availability, throws off the polyrhythms of subsistence, replacing them with the arhythmia of for-profit logistics. The frantic one-order-every-7-seconds of the amazon distribution warehouse and the average 6-month wait aboard the stranded cargo ship are part of the same choreography.


Supply space
The ‘supply chain’, is a bit of a misnomer: although the assembly line has erupted out of the factory, the way it flows isn’t necessarily linear. While the world that logistics projects is one of smooth lines and seamless connections, from the inside it is more like a tidal eddy, an elastic space of crashing flows, one that ultimately produces turbulences that workers find themselves trapped in. It might be more useful to think in terms of supply space, the largely invisibilised ports, ships, distribution centres and special economic zones within which workers find themselves tangled.


Exploded Geographies
Understanding the geographical makeup of supply space requires us to depart from our notions of territorial geography. State jurisdictions, economic geographies and international law (or vacuums within it) are stretched and warped beyond the boundaries of territories. The simultaneous explosion and contraction of nation-state geographies put discrete territories and actors into arrays that facilitate labour exploitation and accumulation, creating a world in which commodities move freely but people don’t. The people that do move freely are those who have been reduced to a commodity: labour power. However, its movement is often only enabled in the service of capital valorisation: the abandoned seafarer is a case in point.

Supply Chain Thickness
Supply chains are often represented as flow charts, discrete networks of frictionless connection. But the supply chain is not a two-dimensional line, it is a space, a zone, that envelopes the lives, the livelihoods, the working and living spaces of many. Eyal Weizman talks about the ‘thickness’ of the border, the threshold zones of securitisation and incarceration that enforce (and constitute) the border. We could also think about the thickness of the supply chain, the boggy nature of supply space that manyprecarious workers find themselves caught in.


Selective state externalisation
Expanding a legal territory beyond borders whilst ensuring that those whom the (absence of) law applies to are exempt from any amenities offered to citizens. It functions like an externalised hostile environment, for hire. Selective state externalisation is a modality of borderisation that constructs elaborate meshes of supranational sovereignty to assist in surplus value extraction.


Supply nets
Moving away from the linear image of neat A to B supply chains, a more useful metaphor might be supply nets: matrices of interconnected lines, prone to becoming tangled. In a recent talk, Fred Moten commented on how capital is always trying to smooth out the line, to impose a Euclidean geometry, but it is always encountering knots: workers. But perhaps this smoothing out of the assembly line or supply chain is only ever a precursor to retying it, into coordinated nets of strategic friction that work in favour of capital.