The Dissonance of Things / Logistics: Violence, Empire and Re-
they carry soon become waste too
sistance (Charmaine Chua & co.)
(We can read the ship by its contact with the land, and vice versa, you can understand the land by its relation with the ship)
The logistics-based flattening of the natural world.
International waters have no sovereignty, ergo is "Terra nullius"
The internet requires certain physical infrastructures. Shipping
as no state controls it. [Just like Australia, but we know how that
is exemplary of human reliance on environmental factors. In
ended]. MALCOLM MCLEAN
the Information Age ‘logistics’ depicts the sea as an infrastructural surface. Those who work on the sea have a very different understanding of it. Yet even those who live with the affective
Part1: The Slow Boat to China / Charmaine Chua
qualities of the sea can easily forget the dangers of oversimplifying the natural world...
Onshore components: Forklifts, spreaders, and trucks with emp-
The affective qualities of the ocean remind those who live with
ty chassis, which sweep past in well-oiled synchrony
it of the Logistics is the management of the circulation of mate-
massive gantry cranes. [Gangway, workers]
rials and ideas through the supply chain (including the military
Across the world’s ocean, 1.5 million invisible seafarers toil
and the corporate supply chain). It has become one of the cen-
on three to nine month contracts to bind the world together
tral disciplines organizing imperialism.
through trade, though they remain, for the most part, isolated
Border security as a threat to supply chains.
in their cabins and mess rooms, retained on precarious short-
Prevalence of non-citizens as labourers in the Arabian peninsula
term contracts, and kept away from their families – indeed, from most of the world.
Waste; the ships become waste, they produce waste. The things
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the supercargo was the sec121