Five theses on understanding logistics as power

Abstract

Today logistics has become central to the orchestration of globalized trade and production. Yet, despite the focus on global connections and disconnections across a range of disciplines, the material operations that enable logistical practices have gone largely unexplored in social and cultural investigations into the operative dimensions of the global. This series of five theses provides a programmatic introduction to a longer research project that aims to reverse this situation. Understanding logistics as power means questioning many of the economic and political shibboleths of current approaches to the global, whether they derive from generalizations about neo-liberal deregulation or assertions about the historical continuity of the state. In particular, it allows a rethinking of the global production of time and space in relation to the production of living labor and the production of subjectivity.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• globalization
• governance
• labor
• logistics
• power
• war