Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson date what they call the “logistics revolution" from the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the Reagan and Thatcher eras of market and institutional deregulation along with neoliberal international free trade agreements.2º They characterize this organizational revolution in terms of changes in production (flexibility and outsourcing), logistics (“intermodalization"), and labor (intensification of contingency, weakening of unions, racialization of labor, lower labor standards). Contemporary logistics aims to minimize inventory buildups, or overaccumulation, which leads to overproduction by manufacturers and retail overstocking (or understocking, as the case may be).21 In both instances, manufacturers and retailers strive for efficiencó in communications to minimize overinvestment in stocks that decline in economic value over time.
The software applications special to logistics visualize and manage the mobility of people, capital, and things, producing knowledge about the world in transit The political challenge today is to devise techniques and strategies that operate outside the territory of control exerted by logistics technologies and their software algorithms that shape how practices of knowledge production are organized, which in turns shapes the conditions and experiences of contemporary labor. As much as the emergent field of software studies celebrates the collective innovation of open source initiatives and radical gestures of hacker cultures, there is a much more profound and substantive technological impact exerted upon labor-power in the formal and informal economies concomitant with the global logistics industries that has not yet received critical attention in analyses of the cultures of code. The challenge of political organization within the logistics industries is steep. Not only are unionized forms of labor organization marginal, where they do exist—in the maritime industries of some countries, for instance—there is great pressure for workers and their representatives to conform to ever-increasing demands for greater workplace productivity and enhanced efficiency modulated by computational systems that manage key performance indicators.22
Against these pressures for increased labor productivity is the savage collapse of labor-power as economies across the world are saddled with the blowout of sovereign debt passed on by massive corporate welfarism in the form of state bailouts of financial institutions—the health of which politicians, shareholders, economists, and traders argue is necessary if consumer life is to continue on its merry path of planetary annihilation. Yet the very model of such institutionalsocial organization is never questioned—except by the people now mobilizing in urban squares and financial districts across the world. Do we understand this in terms of a politics of action, however, or can we gain greater analytical traction and organizational insight by seeing these movements as a politics beyond the actionable, foregrounding nonrepresentational practices rather than repowering the politics of representation?²3 Here, we need to return to the work of translation and collaborative constitution as social-political practices immanent to media of communication.
Acts of Translation
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