FOURTH CRITICAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
“Development, Logistics, and Governance”
(8-10 September 2011)
Name of the Session VI: Surveillance, Labour and State Power
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Abstract
Over the past decade the rise in GPS and administrative technologies has coincided with new forms of biopolitical governance and surveillence in the logistics industries. The implementation of policies such as the Marine Transportation Security Clearance Program in Canadian ports, the introduction of the Radio Frequency Identification chip, and the extended monitoring networks of GPS track and trace systems, amongst others, have all had significant impacts on working conditions. The management of bodies and commodities can now encompass all levels of labour from the minute gestures of box packers, to the pathways of cranes in the warehouse and the rest breaks of freight drivers, to the call content and duration of call centre workers, and the passage of commodities being shipped and apprehended around the globe.
The instantiation of these technologies signals not only a shift in the ways that the industries themselves are structured in relation to the movement of workers and commodities, but also a shift in the wider control of bodies and geoeconomic terrains. The symbiotic relationships between new regimes of national security and economic interest are producing an often noted simultaneous expansion and contraction of mobilities through global capitalism. Given the increasing interest in logistical fields by academics, this paper will investigate some of the technological advancements that have been engendered in this context put to use for the regulation of bodies in a highly deregulated environment. Drawing from conversations with the UK Unite trade union and the International Federation of Transport Workers on specific technologies and their effects on different labour constituencies, the paper will outline these mechanisms from a broader perspective of global supply chains and security culture.
Bionote
Dr. Anja Kanngieser is a cultural geographer with interests in labour self-organisation, migration and the production of subjectivities, relations and worlds. She was awarded a PhD in 2009 jointly from the School of Culture and Communication/ School of Land and Environment at the University of Melbourne, with a dissertation entitled Performative Encounters, Transformative Worlds: Creative Experiments as Radical Politics, Germany 2000-2006. Her work has been published in Subjectivities, Performance Paradigm, Arena and Australasian Drama Studies Journal, and she is co-editor of a Parallax special issue. She has chapters in books Remapping the Radical Avant-Garde, Theorising Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Potentialities and Aesthetics and Radical Politics. She also works with free and community radio. She is currently a researcher for the ARC funded project Culture in Transition: Creative Labour and Social Mobilities in the Asian Century.
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Abstract
Longer than century old Benthamite vision of an enumerable population constituting the political has now become technologically achievable. In the absence of this feasibility population was conceived as mass to be organized by party-system who in turn would contest for power and legislative authority. The party-mass system designed necessarily physically locatable residence or locus of defence. The logistics remained concentrated, for example, along federated mode and for mobilising mass population and for directing a group of population.
Presently the mass has been deciphered and enumerable individuals as body-persons who are taggable and who could as enumerated person tagged with body-indicators be held and confronted directly by the power holder together are constituting the political sphere. Contemporary power-posts of logistics therefore are much less mass-mobilisational and equally surveillance is directed little to the group-body. Legislative and other powers of mass-groups have been taken away and declared anti-constitutional.
Individual-person constitutive practices do now constitute residence of power. Centralisation of power and simultaneous shift from local to unlocatable fuzzy or ubiqutous seat of power mark out our time. This practice is shaped by the act of enumeration of body, for example, body-as-belief shaping constitutes a mode of logistics in contrast to body-as-mass-physical constitutes an alternate mode of power seat.
This foundation of state as logistics is explained now by the arthasastra tradition of fort (durga). Fluidity or ubiquity or other modes of deciphering personhood as a process and also as the outcome shapes up the seat of power logistics. Several modes of durga-types are thus explained. Person-control and person-constitutive as well person-guiding seats constitute logistical modes. Mass mobilisational then gets substituted by mass of enumerated persons directing force.
This essay as by way of example looks into malaria or polio-vaccination drives, the MGNREGA-types that employ UID, the server-location issues including cloud computing issues of logistics constitutive actions.
Bionote
Parthasarathi Banerjee, Director, CSIR-NISTADS, New Delhi has research interests in areas related to social-economic policies especially on science and technology. He has published a few books authored and edited, and has authored a few research articles.