Circulating Violence and Value

Abstract

In recent years, a new critical scholarship and movement organi-zation that is adopting the lens of logistics has emerged, marked by a profound interdisciplinarity. Powerful voices from a wide spectrum of radical theoretical and political commitments are delineating critical logistics as a field of vitality. This dialogue with Deborah Cowen sums up and expands some of the main interpretative lines of research and action in logistics by insisting on the ways that the revolution in logistics has reshaped work and the conditions of work for those in positions or occupations that may not seem immediately logistical, including quite centrally, in the production process, which Cowen suggests are inextricable from logistics today. However, logistics is a paradigm that cannot be reduced to the mode of production in a classical meaning. Logistics enables us to understand peculiar forms of racialization, social reproduction, and social difference, along with geopolitical dynamics. In fact, logistics is a specific character of contemporary forms of power, and struggles over logistics and its infrastructures are imperial and tied to conflicts over land and livelihoods in a much broader frame, as well as impossibly entangled, as they are all concerned with the power to define who or what moves, where, when, and how. Therefore, logistics can be framed as a complex and productive multifaceted lens through which a new critical comprehension of actual dynamics needs to be framed and deepened.