Do Containers Dream of Electric People?

7/29/2019 Do Containers Dream of Electric People?

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30 Open 2011/No. 21/ (Im)Mobility

Brian Holmes

Do Containers

Dream of ElectricPeople?

The Social Form

of Just-in-TimeProduction

Cultural critic

Brian Holmesanalyses thegenesis of thedistributional

machinery ofintermodal trans-port that circu-lates commodi-ties through theglobal economy.

What are theimplications forour way of life,

both for peopletied to a partic-ular area and formigrants? Is it

possible to escapecapitalisms lawsof motion?


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Do Containers Dream of Electric People? 31

British sociologist John Urry has comeup with an unusual idea: deningsociety by the ever-accelerating mobil-ity of its members. To do this he pro-poses the concept ofmobility-systems:Historically most societies have beencharacterized by one major mobility-system that is in an evolving and adap-tive relationship with that societyseconomy, through the production andconsumption of goods and servicesand the attraction and circulation of

the labour force and consumers . . .The richer the society, the greater the

range of mobility-systems that willbe present, and the more complex theintersections between such systems.1Urry devotes chap-ters of his bookMobilities to four infrastructuralsystems: pathways, trains, automo-biles and airplanes. Interestingly, hesuggests that these infrastructures arecomplemented by cultural systemsserving to represent the movement ofpeople and things, to communicate

about it and to imagine its furtherpossibilities. Yet strangely, in a book

1. J. Urry, Mobilities (Cam-

bridge: Polity, 2007), 51.

Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen konomie(Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy),orig. 88

Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passesthrough different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather,an automatic system of machinery, set in motion by an automaton, a movingpower that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanicaland intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its

conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an auto-matic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, istransformed into an existence adequate to xed capital and to capital as such;and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, thedirect means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and cor-responding to it.

In no way does the machine appear as the individual workers means oflabour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means oflabour, to transmit the workers activity to the object; this activity, rather, is pos-ited in such a way that it merely transmits the machines work, the machinesaction, on to the raw material supervises it and guards against interruptions.Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into hisorgan with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on hisvirtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place ofthe worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical lawsacting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matires instrumentales), just asthe worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion.


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that gestures towards the concept ofa technological unconscious, he saysnext to nothing about productionand distribution. Whats missing fromhis mobilities paradigm is containershipping and intermodal transport,

with their associated representational,communicational and imaginary tech-niques. Whats missing is the socialform of just-in-time production.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Urrybelieves that in the postnational erathere is no such thing as society.2Hes against whathas been called thecontainer theoryof the social, whichrelies heavily on spatially boundedcategories, reinforcing methodologicalnationalism.3 In Mobilities he refers toFoucaults conceptof governmental-ity, observing that

state sovereigntyis exercised onterritories, popula-tions and, we mayadd, the move-ments of populations around thatterritory. In contrast he insists on theincreasingly transnational movementof populations, and claims that sucha mobile population is immenselyhard to monitor and govern.4

Urry is an inno-vative sociologist,seeking patterns of emergent order inthe vertiginous circulations of neolib-eral globalism. At its best, his workreads like a kaleidoscopic register

of contemporary life. However, likeother complexity theorists describ-

ing the dynamics of open systems, hefails to take into account the powerfuldrive towards closure that inhabitsall large-scale system design. Thus heignores the determinant social form ofinformational capitalism as though,

entranced by mobilities that exceedthe capture of the nation-state, hehad fallen into the very unconscious-ness that contemporary technologiesimpose.

How to awaken from electricdreams? In this text I will describeboth the technical and the culturaldimensions of what is arguably the

major mobility-system of our time:the distributional machinery of inter-modal transport that circulates com-modities through the global economy.The vector I will use to approach thisfar-ung system is an imaginary one.

Contained Mobility

Picture a video projection on the wallsof a global museum (but it couldalso be your laptop, or an iPhone inthe city). The video opens with thesound of a female voice against thebackground of a swelling sea. It thenresolves into two contrasting scenes.On the left, the computerized viewof a container port, showing shipsat berth or in motion through thechannel. On the right, a surveillancecamera inside a container, where arobust-looking man in an orange shirtmoves between the spartan furnish-ings of an improvised room (bed,desk, table lamp, maps on the corru-

gated wall). The scenes shift back andforth from screen to screen; the graph-

2. J. Urry, Sociology Bey-ond Societies: Mobilitiesfor the Twenty-First Cen-tury (London: Routledge,2000), 5.

3. U. Beck, What Is Glo-balization? (Cambridge:Polity, 2000/German ed.1997), 23-24; J. Law, J.Urry, Enacting the Social

(Department of Sociology/Centre for Science Stu-dies, Lancaster University,2003), at www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Urry-Enacting-the-Social.pdf.

4. Urry, Mobilities, op. cit.(note 1), 49-50.


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ics change in content, granularity andfocus. The man gets up, sits down,strides about, meditates, sleeps. Hisname is Anatol Kuis Zimmermann.Ascrolling text recounts his destiny:born in 1949 of a Belarussian mother

and an ethnic German father whowere deported to Siberia; childhoodin Brest near the Polish border; uni-versity in Minsk; marriage, children,displacement of the family after Cher-nobyl; liberal, pro-European politicalactivities and attempted migrationto Germany. Thus begins an odysseyof deferral, transit and legal limbo,

carrying this asylum seeker throughnearly every country in Europe. Lifeas a geography of refusal. The con-tainer, we are given to understand, isnow his only home. As the off-screenvoice explained at the outset, AnatolZimmermann has come ashore in anoffshore place, in a container world

that only tolerates the translocal stateof not being of this place not of anyother really but of existing in a con-dition of permanent non-belonging, ofjuridical non-existence. He slips intohis makeshift bed as a closing textappears on the left-hand screen: Eve-rything new is born illegal.

The video by Ursula Biemann isentitled Contained Mobility (2004).5Its an extradisci-plinary investiga-tion, by which Imean a work of artthat seeks knowl-edge of the world through a con-frontation with technical operations

and discourses. A crucial part of thissearch is the interview leading to the

reconstruction of Zimmermanns itin-erary. But thats classic documentary,and as such, its not even shown. Noris the location of the container given.What makes the work so striking,and so useful for an examination of

contemporary social relations, is thejuxtaposition between the existentialnarrative of refusal and the abstractedimagery of global transport. Onefeels they are mirrors of each other.As Biemann notes, the visuality ofthe work is based in every respect onsimulation: None of the images ofContained Mobility document reality.Every image is an articial construct:a simulated seascape, a visual render-ing of digital data, a webcam set upfor a staged scene.The video is a con-ceptual statementabout a particularstate of being in

this world.6

The question that emerges fromthe conceptual image is double. First,what materially constitutes the trans-local state of not being of this place?And second, what is the relationbetween this displaced mode of exist-ence and the representational tech-niques of computer simulation?

Logistical LivingLets try to answer that rst question.Intermodal transport, a.k.a. contain-erization, is based on three pillars:rigorous standardization of the boxallowing for stackability in ships

and transfer by specialized cranes totruck or rail; continuous traceability

5. The video can be seenin two parts on YouTube,at http://tinyurl.com/con-tained-mobility. Also seehttp://geobodies.org/01_art_and_videos/2004_con-tained_mobility.

6. J.-E. Lundstrom (ed.),Ursula Biemann: MissionReports (Bristol: Arnol-ni Gallery, 200), 59.The same book includesmy essay, Extradisci-plinary Investigations,also at http://eipcp.net/

transversal/0106.


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thanks to a machine-readable bill oflading; and nally, the ability to locka shipment from initial departure tonal destination. Locally standard-ized containers had been used for landand water transport since the late

nineteenth century, but the onset ofintermodalism dates to 26 April 1956,when Malcom McLean loaded 5aluminium truck bodies onto a tankernamed the Ideal-X for shipment fromNewark to Houston.7 The water-to-wheels conceptoffered increasesin speed and secu-rity as well as bigsavings on labour,all of which was recognized by the government and the military, spurringa national standardization processthat was ratied by the InternationalStandards Organization in 1970.Deregulation of the transport

industry began around the same time,as a crucial component of the emerg-ing neoliberal order; it was completedin all branches by the early 190s. Therationalization of the docks broke thepower of the longshoremens unions,historically the strongest and mostinternationalist sector of the labourmovement. These developmentssmoothed the wayfor an integratedintermodal systemthat spread rap-idly across the world, slashing freightcosts and making logistics the keyoperational discipline of a globalizingeconomy. Given the military origins

of logistics, its signicant that therst big government contracts with

McLeans Sea-Land corporation werefor war materiel to Vietnam. And itsequally signicant that Sea-Landswartime business became immenselyprotable when McLean realized thatthe returning containers could be

lled with the rising tide of manufac-tured goods from Japan.

The late 1960s saw the take-off ofthe Japanese economy, rst in lightconsumer goods and then, after theoil shock of 1973, in fuel-efcientautomobiles. Already the ToyotaMotor Corporation had developedits system of continuous informa-

tion ow between manufacturer andsupplier, allowing for the delivery ofcustom-built parts in exact propor-tion to current needs without costlywarehousing. The advent of contain-erization meant that just-in-time pro-duction could be extended to an entireEast Asian maritime network includ-

ing the Four Tigers of Hong Kong,Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea a network that would ultimately re-centre on coastal China.9 In the wakeof Toyotas suc-cess, just-in-timeor lean produc-tion imposed itselfon global auto-makers. It receivedwider attentionthrough a best-selling industry studyentitled The Machine that Changedthe World(where machine refersnot to a single device but to an inte-grated process).10 is what made

the world translo-cal. However, its

7. M. Levinson, The Box:How the Shipping Con-tainer Made the WorldSmaller and the World

Economy Bigger (Prin-ceton University Press,2006), 1 andpassim.

. For a photo/text reec-tion on containerizationsconsequences for labour,see A. Sekula, Fish Story(Rotterdam: Witte de With/Richer Verlag, 1995).

9. P.J. Katzenstein and T.Shiraishi, Network Power:

Japan and Asia (CornellUP, 1997); Ho-Fung Hung,Americas Head Servant?The PRCs Dilemma in theGlobal Crisis, New LeftReview 60, November-December 2009.

10. J.P. Womack, D.T.Jones and D. Roos, TheMachine that Changed the

World: The Story of LeanProduction (New York:Rawson Associates, 1990).


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adoption by Western corporationsafter 199 turned it into somethingvery different from the trust-basedrelations between manufacturer andsupplier extolled by the venerable MrToyoda. What emerged from the open

markets of neoliberalism was a vastdelivery system commanded by retail-ers engaged in a vicious search for thebest possible price. And that turnedout to be the China price: the lowestnumber on the planet for any categoryof basic manufactured goods.

By 2005, Wal-Mart imported some350,000 40-foot containers a year of

manufactured goods. Thats almost30,000 tonnesper day, the majorityfrom China.11 The containers passthrough the portsof Long Beachand Los Angelesbefore departingby rail to truck transhipment centres

feeding warehouse-sized stores. Thusthe box spawned the big box andwith it, a whole new science of supplychain management, whose effect hasbeen to drive both prices and wages torock-bottom levels.12 Though big-boxretailing is mostcommon in the, a list of globalrms operatingon the Wal-Mart model now includesCarrefour, Aldi, Metro, Royal Ahold,Tesco, Ito-Yokado, Kingsher, and, as well as Home Depot, Costcoand Best Buy.13What began as aformula for auto-

mobile productionhas led to a world-

wide re-articulation of industry, mer-chandising and consumption.

Since its origins in the early 190s,supply chain management has becomethe obligatory model for globalizingbusinessmen, who adopt just-in-time

principles as a logistical ethos forcorporate existence. As a techni-cal manual explains, the footprintof the rms global facilities . . . forsourcing, research and development,production, distribution and retailsales, and the effective coordinationand management of all ows betweenthem (information, physical/prod-

uct, and nancial ows) become themajor determinants of competitivesuccess.14 Marc Levinson, author ofThe Box, describesthe effects suchpractices hadon an Americanconsumer icon as

early as the mid-1990s: Workers inChina produced her statuesque gure,using molds from the United Statesand other machines from Japan andEurope. Her nylon hair was Japanese,the plastic in her body from Taiwan,the pigments American, the cottonclothing from China. Barbie, simplegirl though she is, had developed hervery own global supply chain.15

Logistics assem-bles the raw mate-rial of our lives. It is in this sense thateveryone not just Anatol Zimmer-mann lives in a container world.But crucial questions emerge, whenlogistics is generalized into supply

chain management. How are globalows coordinated with local markets

11. E. Bonacich andJ.B. Wilson, Getting theGoods: Ports, Labor andthe Logistics Revolution(Cornell University Press,200), 25.

12. See the PBS documen-tary, Is Wal-Mart Good forAmerica? (2004), availableat www.pbs.org/wgbh/

pages/frontline/shows/walmart.

13. M. Petrovic and G.G.Hamilton, Making GlobalMarkets: Wal-Mart and ItsSuppliers, in N. Lichten-stein (ed.), Wal-Mart: The

Face of 21st Century Capi-talism (New York: NewPress 2006), 10.

14. Kouvelis and Su, TheStructure of Global Sup-ply Chains, special issue,Foundations and Trends inTechnology, Informationand Operations Manage-ment1/4, 2005, 1-2.

15. Levinson, The Box, op.cit. (note 7), 264.


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to make a prot in real time? Andwhat effect do the giant distributionmachines have on the stationary peo-ple who ultimately receive and con-sume the mobile commodities?

Real-Time UnconsciousTo answer those questions we mustdeal with the representation of mobil-ity-systems. At stake are the abstractmodels that regulate the temporal andspatial functioning of large and com-plex production lines. Surprisingly, itturns out that by the late 1950s the

major problem of the big-box retailers coordinating the levels of accessiblestocks with the rates of ow throughstores had already been solved, theo-retically at least, by a pioneer of com-puter simulation.

Jay Wright Forrester was a servo-mechanisms engineer in the Second

World War, then head of a programmeto build the Whirlwind, a multipur-pose digital computer that was ini-tially to be used in a ight simulator.That project morphed into the basisof the radar-defence system (forsemi-automatic ground environ-ment).16 By 1956, after inventingmagnetic corememory and over-seeing the rise of as the smainframe sup-plier, Forresterdecided that the excitement in thecomputer eld was over, and switchedto management studies. His break-

through came two years later, whenGeneral Electric executives asked

him to examine their appliance fac-tories, which would oscillate wildlyfrom peak demand to near inactiv-ity, irrespective of business cycles. Heimmediately recognized the classichunting pattern that occurs when a

servomechanism receives undampedfeedback from an initial action, thenovercorrects, generating more distort-ing feedback.

Forrester was convinced that indus-trial managers were unable to graspthe multiple rhythms of giant plantshooked into even larger distributionsystems, and were actually worseningtheir problems instead of curing them.He designed a non-linear computermodelling program to show howpolicy decisions affecting the rates ofow between ve interconnected cat-egories of stocks materials, orders,money, capital equipment and person-nel could be represented graphically

in their effects over time, so as toreveal the unforeseen consequencesof single interventions. The policydecisions could then be corrected viaa sixth category, coordinated feed-back information. This analysis laidthe basis of a new managerial logic,known as system dynamics.17

Most historiesof cyberneticsnever mentionengineers, focus-ing instead onscientists andthe occasionalphilosopher.1Yet Forrester is

undoubtedly thesingle most inu-

16. For Forresters invol-

vement in , seeP.N. Edwards, The ClosedWorld: Computers andthe Politics of Discourse inCold War America (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press,1996), chapters 2 and 3.

17. J.W. Forrester, Indu-

strial Dynamics (Waltham,MA: Pegasus Communica-tions, 1961); Principles ofSystems (Cambridge, MA:Wright-Allen Press, 196).

1. A notable exceptionis D.A. Mindell, BetweenHuman and Machine:Feedback, Control, andComputing before Cyber-netics (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press,

2002).


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From Jy W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics (Cmbridge, Ma: MIT Press,

1985/1st edition 1961), 174.


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ential cybernetician, since his workhas allowed the coordination of vastproduction, distribution and consump-tion processes taking place on oppositesides of the planet. It is fascinatingto realize that his radar-defence

program led very quickly to ,or semi-automatic business-researchenvironment, which is still the worldslargest airline ticketing network. Theease with which we ignore the veryexistence of such crucial transportsystems has everything to do with thetechnological unconscious, arisingfrom the automation of large num-

bers of routine actions to which weno longer pay the slightest attention.Nigel Thrift explains this computer-ized repetition-compulsion: Throughthe application of a set of technologiesand knowledges (the two being impos-sible to separate), a style of repetitionhas been produced which is more con-

trolled and also more open-ended, anew kind of roving empiricism whichcontinually ties up and undoes itselfin a search for the most efcient waysto use the space and time of eachmoment.19 As the designer of semi-automatic environ-ments includinghuman beings insubordination tomechanical and computational devices,Forrester was at the origin of this rov-ing technological unconscious. Yethe found that his ideas could not beunderstood by the corporate class hewas addressing. Only in the 190s didthey start making

intuitive sense tomanagers.20

There was a technical reason. In the1960s and 1970s, Forresters simula-tions could not yet run with real-timeinformation. Instead, approximatemodels were created and statisticalforecasting techniques were employed.

From the 190s onward, quantumleaps in data-gathering and commu-nications technology transformed allthat. With the advent of electronicdata interchange (), every aspectof production, transport, display andsales could be recorded, communi-cated, represented and analysed, so asto continuously map out the position

and trajectory of each single objectbeing handled by a world-spanningcorporation.21 The result is an execu-tive informationsystem that givesmanagers cen-tralized access toa continuously

evolving set oflogistical data, bringing dynamicsimulation over the line into real-time representation. This providesthe unprecedented ability to ration-alize labour at every point alongthe chain, accelerating the pace andsqueezing workers for higher levels ofproductivity. Still its not enough forcontemporary capitalism. As systemsdesigner Paul Westerman explains,Aggressive retailers (like Wal-Mart)will not stop there; they will continueuntil all company data is available foranalysis. They will build an enterprisedata warehouse. They give all thisinformation to their internal users

(buyers) and external users (suppliers)to exploit and demand measurable

19. N. Thrift, Remem-bering the TechnologicalUnconscious, in KnowingCapitalism (London: Sage,

2005), 223.

20. See L. Fisher, TheProphet of UnintendedConsequences, in Stra-tegy + Business 40 (Fall2005), 7.

21. For denitions of ,see G. Boone and D. Kurtz,Contemporary Business,13th Edition (Hoboken:Wiley, 2010), 219-20, aswell as Bonacich and Wil-son, Getting the Goods,op. cit. (note 11), esp. 5

and 35.


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improvement.22Such is the formulaof global supplychain manage-ment, in an information-age economywhere the push of Fordist industrial

production and state planning hasbeen replaced by the pull of giantretail conglomerates.

With enterprise data warehousing,the just-in-time machine becomes bothextensively and intensively pervasive. is correlated with cash-ow, mar-keting and nancing information.Point-of-sale data is associated with

individual names on credit cards, thencombined with cascades of other datagleaned from the Internet, generatingbehaviour proles that can be usedfor the ne-tuning of display andadvertising strategies. The models ofoptimal future performance built onthe analysis of past actions are then

relayed upstream to govern the behav-iour of workers, middle managers andsuppliers, and downstream to inu-ence consumers, creating what Wester-man calls a unied data system ()embracing every aspect of corporateplanning. The big boxes of Wal-Martnow cast a 70-terabyte informationshadow. To be sure, the possibilitiesof have not yet been fully imple-mented. is still rare among Chi-nese suppliers, while surveillanceoperators like Google and Facebookare only beginning to codify and sellour intimate data-bodies. There is noneed to exaggerate the deploymentof data integration. But even less can

one ignore the tremendous advancesin communication between manufac-

turers and distributors, the increas-ing granularity of representation thatthis communication makes possible,and last but not least, the acceleratingabsorption of consumer imaginariesinto the managed ows of the pull

economy.What appears on the horizon is a

self-shaping or autopoetic modellingprocess that can integrate hundredsof millions of individuals and billionsof discrete objects and desires into asingle mobility-system, where everymovement is coordinated with everyother in real time. The integrative

capacity of this kind of autopoeticsystem is what denes the boundaryof each corporate entity, strugglingagainst all others to increase the mar-ket-share that it controls. Under theseconditions we live in an open worldof universal free trade across nationalborders, where giant organizations

strive to impose closure on mobilepopulations. Their computerizedmap becomes our intimate territory.Such a dystopian state was once theexclusive province of science ction:Philip K. Dick novels, where androidsdreamed of electric sheep. But thecontainer, having spawned the bigbox, now seems destined to bring aworld-spanning containment strategyinto being. The electronic dream is tomaintain continuous contact betweena global production system and you,the consumer, whose mobility neednot signify uncertainty of behaviour.According to this dream, no desireshould linger free without a sale.

The representational techniques thatenable such a strategy have seen vast

22. P. Westerman, DataWarehousing: Using theWal-Mart Model(SanDiego: Academic Press,2001), 26.


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changes since the 1960s. Today theyinclude multi-agent systems, wherethe decisions of autonomous actorsare simulated on both the supply andthe demand sides of the equation.23On the basis of

such simulations,multiple autopo-etic systems areorchestrated intosmoothly functioning machines serv-ing unied purposes. Yet behind suchsophisticated devices one can still rec-ognize the outlines of semi-automatedenvironments, where the individualow-chart of every object and actor isanalysed into the coordinated curvesof system dynamics.24 Like an archi-tectural plan for a global factory inmotion, thoseintersecting curvesdene the socialform of just-in-

time production.

EscapeTo tie up the threads of this argument,lets return to what started the wholething rolling: John Urrys intriguingbut radically undeveloped concept ofmobility-systems. Its ironic to ndUrry, in Sociology Beyond Societies,reecting that his own discipline willnot survive its transition to the globalscale if it does not once again link itsdestinies to social movements.25 Hadhe done exactlythat with the socialmovement closest

to his own concerns namely, tran-snational migration he might have

seen how the spatially bounded con-tainers that formerly dened nationalsocieties are being replaced, not by theliberal ideology of open systems, butinstead by postliberal constructs likethe big-box retailers, whose dis-

tribution machines are enabled bothby advanced technology and by deter-ritorialized state-functions (monetaryregimes, transport surveillance pro-grams, selective border controls, for-eign trade zones inscribed in domesticterritories, etc.). The exploitation andoppression that such hybrid constructsexert on cut-price migrant labour has

been made explicit by recent strugglesof workers in the intermodal transportindustry.26 And the society shaped bythese postliberalaggregates hasbeen theorized bya group of sociologists who take theirstand with the migrants.

In a book entitled Escape Routes:Control and Subversion in the 21stCentury, these theorists nd anexample of social form in the auto-mobile industry: the recently opened plant in Leipzig, designed bythe architect Zaha Hadid. As theyexplain, the building enables innova-tive working-time models and oper-ating times of 60 to 140 hours perweek, and because of this the plantcan react quickly to specic changesin the market. What the just-in-timefactory reveals is the peculiar articu-lation of openness and closure thatdenes a contemporary mobility-sys-tem: The plant is an interactive

order, neither open nor closed, butopen as soon as it incorporates the

23. For a denition seeany of the recent business

manuals, such as B. Chaib-draa and J.P. Mller (eds.),Multiagent based SupplyChain Management(Sprin-ger, 2006).

24. This is the thesis of H.Akkermans and N. Del-laert (eds.), The Dynamicsof Supply Chains andNetworks, special issue,System Dynamics Review21/3 (2005).

25. Urry, Sociology BeyondSocieties, op. cit. (note2), 1.

26. See the articles athttp://www.warehousewor-kersunited.org.


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actors necessary for its functioning,and closed as soon as it can protectand sustain its functionality. The plantis not maintained by its exclusivitynor by an internally generated authen-ticity, but rather by a uid belonging

of different independent trajectoriesto an effective system of production.It is an aggressive structure, opposingeverything that sets limits to its owninternal interests or tries to infuse itwith impurity. The plant reactsaggressively to the fear of viruses, itis aseptic, clean, pragmatic: Westernoblivion at the highest level.27

Hadids jag-gedly owingarchitecture ena-bles the materialprocess of inclu-sion/exclusion in todays society, whilehelping the public to forget its veryexistence. Here again, semi-automated

ows create unconsciousness, eras-ing histories of emancipation. Forthe authors ofEscape Routes, thecoercive structures of postliberal glo-balization took form as the answer tothe wild insurgency and escape thatemerges after the Second World War.This insurgency reached a peak in196, when the nation-states prom-ise of rights and representation (thedouble-R axiom) was challenged byexcluded minority subjects. Yet theopening of borders and the relaxationof social strictures soon gave way tothe new state-corporate aggregates,operating in transnational zones ofexception without any requirement

of legitimacy. Under these conditions,demands for class, ethnic and gender

equality lose their effectiveness. Theparadoxical response is a politics ofimperceptibility, whereby migrantsin their eeting singularity becomeinvisible to postliberal power forma-tions. Recalling the liminal gure we

encountered at the outset, the authorsofEscape Routes might claim: We areall Anatol Zimmermann.

The incongruity of the asylumseeker, abandoned in his improviseddwelling amid technological desola-tion, could evoke this sense of new-found freedom. As Ursula Biemannclaims: Everything new is born

illegal. On a more troubling note,however, Biemann recounts that atone point in her interviews with Zim-mermann she felt compelled to dropher documentary neutrality, offeringto buy him a counterfeit Polish pass-port that would eventually grant himentry to the European Union: Anatol

declined. Salvation would have meantthe death of his problem, which bynow was obviously not only a burdenbut also the condition with which hehas come to identify: to march in thecracks between nations as the post-migratory subject into which he hasmutated.2 Are we to understand themigrants fate asdouble, perma-nently excludedfrom a fully satisfying life, yet irreme-diably attached to the mirage of inclu-sion? Would this be the condition oflife in a container world?

Ill close, not with an answer tothose questions, but with a restate-

ment of the enigma constituted by thesocial form of just-in-time production.

27. Dimitris Papadopoulos,Niamh Stephenson andVassilis Tsianos, EscapeRoutes: Control and Sub-version in the 21st Century(London: Pluto, 200), 26.

2. Lundstrom, Ursula

Biemann, op. cit. (note6), 59.


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As weve seen, global society is lledby a rising tide of inexpensive goods,managed by increasingly automatedsystems and destined for consumerswhose very desires are modelled bythe supply chains. This is the world of

the commodity, whose concrete prom-ise of use-value is constantly belied byits abstract form as exchange-value.The conditions of exchange are suchthat despite the productivity gains oftechnology, work is still devalued toa bare minimum: the working day asthe socially necessary labour timerequired for the purchase of a minimal

basket of commodities. Today it is theprice of an exploited Chinese workingday that exerts downward pressureon wages everywhere, throwing otherworkers out of a job even as it oodsour lives with cheapened goods thatmust be thrown away almost imme-diately. In this sense, society really is

dened by the ever-accelerating mobil-ity of its members: workers, manag-ers, consumers, all differently caughtwithin the same compulsion to stepon the pedal. The Marxist philoso-pher Moishe Postone points out thatthis dynamics of commodity produc-tion amounts to a strange destiny ofdomination by time. His abstractstatement of the problem reads likea concrete description of existencein the capitalist mobility-system: Asa result of the general social media-tion, labour time expenditure is trans-formed into a temporal norm thatnot only is abstracted from, but alsostands above and determines, indi-

vidual action. Just as labour is trans-formed from an action of individuals

to the alienated general principle ofthe totality under which the individu-als are subsumed, time expenditure istransformed from a result ofactivityinto a normative measure for activ-ity . . . This process, whereby a con-

crete, dependentvariable of humanactivity becomesan abstract, inde-pendent variablegoverning thisactivity, is realand not illusory.It is intrinsic to

the process ofalienated socialconstitution.29

Cigar-smoking billionaires stillexist, of course: I saw them last nightin Oliver Stones new lm, MoneyNever Sleeps. But the enigma of ourera is the depersonalized principle

that governs the estranging machine.Capital itself, in all its abstraction,is the electric dream. For those whodo not feel at home in its translocalcontainer world, nor free in the wildanomaly of imperceptible wander-ings, awakening will have to comethrough an as-yet unimagined socialsubversion of capitalisms universallyrepresented and constantly commu-nicated laws of motion. Its a matterof somehow altering societys uncon-scious rhythms. A tigers leap just outof time?

29. M. Postone, Time,Labor and Social Domi-nation: A Reinterpretationof Marxs Critical Theory(New York: Cambridge UP,1993), 214-215. Amongmany commentaries Irecommend HowardSlaters text on counter-cultural artistic practiceas a political cure for alie-nation: Toward Agonism Moishe Postones Time,Labour & Social Domi-

nation (2006), availableat www.metamute.org/en/toward-agonism.

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