Temporal Politics and Banal Culture

Before the Future

Peter Conlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781317004141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the absence of a strong alignment with the future in contemporary social life and explores anomalous temporal experience as a way to expand political imaginations. In the aftermath of the modern myth of progress, it argues we have entered into a kind of dystopia—brutal or seemingly benign—of the continual present that is resistant to systemic change but is nevertheless animated through cycles of novelty and obsolescence. Exploring a condition in which we are out of ideas and facing a 'non-future' of blind technical improvement and fear, the author examines the heterochronia of eerie atmospheres and temporal suspensions. Rather than a reinstatement of the great dream of The Future, a temporality of possibility is explored in strange dimensions of otherwise mundane sites: logistic spaces and ex-urban landscapes; boredom connected to digital media; and the material culture of a recently abandoned town. Drawing on contemporary social and cultural theory, as well as urban geography and media studies, the book develops its conceptual position through a series of vignettes of key sites and experiences. Through an elliptical and generative approach, it analyses zones where novelty collapses and where figures of defiance and possibility might emerge. A rigorous theoretical examination of contemporary life and culture grounded in a close examination of sites and material examples, Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future will appeal to scholars of social theory, sociology, cultural geography, cultural studies and social philosophy.

1 Into logistic grey zones

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548944-2

[These] monuments seem to be a patent amalgam of clock, labyrinth and cargo terminal. What time was about to be told, and what even stranger cargo would have landed here?

(Ballard 2000)

Brecht, who did not want to lag behind his epoch, said it was futile for a realist to stare at workers trudging through the gates of Krupp in the morning. Once reality has migrated into abstract economic functions, it can no longer be read in human faces.

(Schwarz 2005, 92)

The examination of impasses of the future and a search for ways of activating temporal political imaginations lead us into logistic landscapes. In an exploration of low-density culture, we enter utilitarian logistic parks. The blandness, technicity and apolitical tone of these spaces will be a preoccupation in this chapter, and function as recurring entry points to examine issues around the future—prototypes of capitalist techno-futures, zones of futurelessness or spaces conducive to temporal anomalies. To investigate these sites is bound up in unseeing them—to defuse their negative hallucinations and simple present tenses wrapped up in ahistorical functionality, and instead, detect glimmers of much larger, stranger forces. Ultimately, the task might be to glimpse ‘what organises history but is unrepresentable within it’ (Jameson 1995, 75). Logistical zones are key sites of maintaining contemporary life, yet these spaces are certainly not given such importance. A metabolism of social life occurs here—the circulation of food, clothing, communication, psychic stimulation, energy and waste matter. This discrepancy between importance and insignificance is what we are here to explore, along with other related rifts. The eeriness of these spaces lies in dynamics around legibility and invisibility. These sites are in certain ways merely emblems of planetary-scale assemblages (usually reduced to global supply chains)—a tiny tip of an utterly immense system extending out on so many different levels. Their reality lies not in what is in front of you but in so many other spaces, systems and most of all, in their organisation of time. Taking inspiration from land artist Robert Smithson’s explorations of industrial and logistical sites, the aim is to find in these vast but relatively temporary constructions other temporalities—infinitesimal moments or drastic time frames (geological, cosmic), and disturbances in the usual coordinates of reality. As the above quote from JG Ballard encapsulates, Smithson investigated intersections between capitalist modernity, geological time and cultural meaning, and brought us to see these sites as ‘monuments’ in a sphere exceeding functionalism and economic expropriations.

This chapter, following a stage-setting of key terms and conceptual framing, consists of a series of vignettes exploring spatial–temporal composition of logistical sites. It works through some of the terms of Frederic Jameson’s cognitive mapping but then takes this mapping in an eerie direction. While encompassing concrete details, the task is not to realistically reflect these spaces, but rather, to work from a border between a here-and-now real and a stratum of abstractions, uncertainties and imaginaries with the aim of exploring disquieting atmospheres that erase distinctions between these. In these investigations, I detail some of their concrete qualities and socio-economic circumstances and how these generate certain atmospheres. The tactic is to begin with clear, straightforward descriptions, and through a slipstream movement described in the introduction, extend towards gaps or instances in which the presumptions of capitalist space-time wears thin, appears implausible for all its here-and-now incontrovertibility. The chapter sounds out the greyness of these sites—probing these functional spaces in different ways, seeing what can be learned, how their qualities can lapse into eeriness, and then drain away any fascination and return to their purported functions. Before establishing what is meant by logistics and how I will explore these sites, consider an initial example.

The Corby hallucination

Located in the Midlands (UK), Corby has been redeveloped from post-industrial decline (a former location of the steel industry) into a logistics hub. The town (a post-war New Town, largely suburban in layout and housing stock) is dwarfed by large logistic areas and industrial estates. These are comprised of campuses of immense warehouses, constructed in the past 20 years and parts of it within the last few years or still under construction. These zones sit outside more familiar spaces: urban or suburban residential spaces, industrial or agricultural areas, or institutional spaces (hospitals, universities, military bases); they are also outside of more familiar logistical areas such as train stations, freight yards and airports. They are closest to harbour facilities: dockland warehouses without a dock and without a city. In a background world parallel to the everyday life of consumers and residents, these sites are not built to be experienced or even really to be seen closely except for those within the logistics sector. Using coinage like logistics hub or redevelopment masks or underplays what is really occurring here. This is an environment that has been sculpted by forces—unmistakable in ways and mysterious in others, manifestations of abstract powers both extensive and intensive—which acclimates those within these landscapes and beyond. As the above quotation by Roberto Schwarz indicates, this is not just a matter of workers, or large warehouses and infrastructures, but an alteration of reality.

Such a reality migration has been ongoing for several centuries, but we don’t feel a strong weight of history here; and despite new constructions, Corby does not appear like a gateway to the future either. Is this what a futureless and amnestic environment looks like? What are ways to attune to its time in a zone where space and flows dominate? It is even hard to get any kind of time signature here at all, beyond its evident 24/7 logistical impulse. The space, too, can be disorienting due to its abstract placement—economic and infrastructural factors decide the location and the particular arrangement and shape. Other than a proximity to a motorway, these are not discernible. Logistical Corby makes more sense from network diagrams, spreadsheets and from the air or in satellite images of regions; in fact, they are built from and for these vantages and normally unseen gazes. They are also generated through adjacent conditions which are transferred over, for example, the Midlands Logistics Park promotes the low gross weekly pay average and the number of unemployed people in Corby as an attractive demographic of the site (Midlands Logistics Park 2021). These logistic areas begin as one moves out of the town centre past the Tesco Superstore into a cluster of ‘older’ (from 10 to 20 years past) giant warehouses (CEVA Logistics, iForce, Iron Mountain). Further out one finds recently constructed subdivision ‘villages,’ and then into the newly built logistic park (John Lewis distribution, Eddie Stobart, Europa Worldwide) near the Cazoo Preparation Centre Corby (an online used car company, with a ‘preparation, processing and imaging facility’) which is comprised of mainly parking lots that stretch over a kilometre.

These spaces are partly illegible because we lack a language for them—we see them all the time but tend to ignore them like household fixtures. Politically, they are outside most of our terms of reference and mythologies— lacking the associations of the factory; the metropolitan centre with its institutions, cultural sites, locations of pivotal historical moments; and also distinct from the suburbs with their increasingly decisive political base and post-war cultural narratives. These are spaces of recent infrastructure that drive a new political ordering (Cowen 2012), and are culturally under-coded. They are ubiquitous, crucial sites of contemporary capitalism yet largely unknown. They lie within the present’s idea of the future—cutting edge of digital infrastructure, new formations of commerce and sociality—yet in a vague, dematerialised ‘cloud’ imaginary of virtual entities, and thus largely erased.

Rudy Giuliani’s infamous press conference, following the 2020 American presidential election, held in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping (on the outskirts of Philadelphia near the I95) being a notable exception of media attention to such zones. In fact, it was seen as outrageous precisely because of the combination of Giuliani’s crazed presence in such an underwhelming site completely off the normal political map. The location was deliberate and was not supposed to be in the Four Seasons Hotel in central Philadelphia as was assumed by many media commentators. It was actually chosen to avoid protest (from activists based in the metropolitan core) and to situate the event closer to the areas where Trump’s supporters live (Burns 2020). Some of the few examples of cultural sites located in the logistics penumbra include theme parks (such as Drayton Manor in the Midlands), ‘mega churches’ (primarily in the US but are appearing in the UK) and Prince’s Paisley Park which is coming to be seen as a Graceland for the twenty-first century. It is located in Chanhassen (an exurb of Minneapolis), near a highway exit and beside self-storage warehouses. The largely windowless mansion of this enigmatic musical legend is comprised of a big box utility structure originally designed as a storage facility and recording complex.

‘Our present as fundamentally a time of logistic space’ (Cowen 2012, 5)

A conventional definition of logistics is an activity that organises the distribution of goods to customers. However, logistics goes well beyond mere shipping into a ‘social and spatial assembly’ (200). These spaces are key sites in supply systems, yet the activity is more complex and extensive. Logistics has come to define contemporary capitalism (‘supply chain capitalism’ Tsing 2009), and is an integral aspect of a new geopolitical imaginary (Cowen 2012) in which states and borders are configured differently than the Westphalian sovereignty of territorial states. Current logistics is comprised of emergent interactions between trade, security and military enacted in ‘a new map of the world’ (1). Logistical sites and practices function as a fundamental organisation of life and as a mechanism of control. Capital has reorganised in a logistical manner, supposedly overcoming crises of accumulation in an acceleration of commodity flows, decreased turnover times, and in the exploitation of labour markets. This logistics revolution is associated with terms like lean manufacturing, flexibility, pull production and just-in-time inventory systems; but it goes beyond what we think of as a more limited economic activity and conveyance from production site to consumption. To begin with, commodities today are manufactured across logistics space rather than in a singular place, as such, ‘[l]ogistics relies heavily on complex calibrations of multiple locations’ (Cowen 205) to the point where it is misleading to see a single site in isolation. Through the twentieth century, the purview of logistics expanded. ‘The military art of moving stuff gradually became not only the “umbrella science” of business management but, in Nigel Thrift’s words, “perhaps the central discipline of the contemporary world” ’ (4). But the rise and amplification of logistics extend into even more fundamental relations to life, with major epistemological and ontological presumptions which are relentlessly enforced on populations. The ‘logistical gaze’ (Harney 2018; Rossiter 2019) is a way of apprehending life through the logic of the organisation of circulation. It requires far-reaching access, tracking, measuring and calculation, and these kinds of logistical relations enter almost all major institutions (education, health, etc.) and shape a great deal of everyday experience.

My intention is to examine some of the most conventional logistical sites—in their concrete, material particularity—but through an analysis that embraces a very extensive understanding of the concept, especially as it is elucidated in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s remarkable writing on contemporary social life and political thought (2013, 2021). From its founding moment in the Atlantic slave trade, logistics seeks to containerise and put into ‘the hold’ (2013, 87) as much of life as possible—even if it can never really control it. In this way, logistics is at the very centre of capitalist modernity. It is the modality that drives imperialism and capital’s appropriation of value—its tapping of vitality—through relentless rationalising, individualising and dematerialising. As such, it requires us ‘to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption’ (87). Harney and Moten stress the pivotal move from the strategic subject to the logistical object. Logistics displaces strategy in both war and business. ‘Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more’ (88). Logistics is no longer the means of supplying the army, rather, circulation is the war. Within logistical capitalism, this is then generalised into a condition of everyday life. Accordingly, rather than acting upon subjects, the logistical order works through the idea of converting human subjects to objects within its circulations, or at least into the halfway house of the automatic subject. ‘[A]s Marina Vishmidt reminds us, the automatic subject of capital that human capital seeks to emulate, is a hollow subject, and a subject dedicated to hollowing itself’ (90).

A not insignificant dimension of this expansion of logistics that I will be exploring is its blandness—the logistical void of tedious technical details, identical units (containers, rows of servers, pallets), office park aesthetics, etc. That is, I am detailing materiality within sites of profound dematerialisation. Logistic sites exhibit a blank aesthetics (broad unadorned surfaces, simple rectangular forms, dull colouring, etc.). The bodies, land and constructions of these sites are within a hyper-abstract and instrumental modality that seems to render all matter as generic as possible with the objective of producing a ‘space of infinite equivalence’ (Jameson 410). This is an aesthetic dimension of a carefully advanced neutrality, wherein land grabs, alterations of borders and the militarisation of space are presented as apolitical, or more likely, antipolitical ‘technicity’ (Cowen 4). The supposed neutrality of the mere efficiency of shipping is within ‘the antipolitical assemblage of logistics’ (4) which conceals contestation and the melding of civilian and military functions.

A desire called cognitive mapping

How to engage these spaces and in what mode of exploration and analysis? Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping—in its drive to connect everyday experience to vast forces—provides some key parameters and a starting point, especially in its basic premise that the most formative elements of everyday life are absent yet there is an enforcement of a larger systemic control stemming from these missing forces. Cognitive mapping begins from the feeling of disorientation arising from rifts between experience and vast, complex socio-economic forces. When ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Into logistic grey zones
• 2 Obsolete wastes of time: Boredom by way of alien junk consciousness
• 3 The enigma of Kitsault
• Index