Cowen, Deborah. “The Deadly Life of Logistics,” University of Minnesota Press, 2014
Marcin Jozwiak, Unsplash
Claims: Logistics is an industry that is politically charged while presents itself as neutral. It is a valid part of production. It brings new kinds of crises, new paradigms of security, new uses of law, new logics of killing, and a new map of the world.
Who deals with: a view of consumer who does not see any logistics in their day-to-day life; "supply chain security" movement. Philosopher Michel Foucault, anthropologist Mark Duffield, cultural theorist Raymond Williams.
Method: A critique of a view of logistics as political neutral phenomenon, placing geography in the center of analysis. This is done via mixing sociological approach to the entanglement of military and economic force and Foucauldian genealogic approach to the shifting contours of power (Society Must Be Defended).
Why important: contributes to political sociology, anthropology and behavioural science in analysing connections between geography, logistics and forms of knowledge.
Relevance to my research: developing a spatial approach to thinking (online pages as different geographic locations); argument for political life of forms of knowledge that present themselves as purely technical is instrumental to developing my critique of ideology.
Aim: to sketch an emerging network of power and violence, shoing that seemingly banal and technocratic management of the movement of stuff through space has become a driving force of war and trade.
Limitations: geography of the book is limited for the reason that comprehensiveness is not necessary when studying distributed phenomena (17, quoting Kelty, 2008:20).
Chapter breakdown:
- History and context (debates in the fields of systems analysis, business, and physical distribution management).
- Political ground: supply chain security. Next three chapters break this down further:
- Labour: managing the bodies and movements
of productive labor. - Piracy.
- Urban revolution. Emergence of "logistics city”. a mix of miiltayr base and corporate export processing zone.
- Conclusion: alternative futures.
- - - -
Notes:
Transportation as an element of production rather than merely a service that follows production (2)
Analysis is performed along the following axes:
- militarization of the economy and the privatization of warfare;
- political life of forms of knowledge that present themselves as purely technical;
- Logistics as contemporary imperialism (8). "Present" as time of "logistics space", where violence is based on legal, conceptual and geographical shifts between the civilian and the military.
- queer reading of logistics (looking at it from the point of view of other). (5)
Maps: are not territories but nevertheless crucially important in the production of space (Lefebvre 1991, The Production of Space).
