Follow the software : reflections on the Logistical Worlds project

In the end, the question that haunts this chapter and volume is not about whether understandings of capitalism inflected through either the Chinese or Indian experience are applicable to distant locations. Investigating the dynamics of region-making through the frames of labour and logistics offers a way of subtracting traditional notions of civilization and geopolitics from the debate about capitalism's variegations and regional forms. The emphasis falls rather on the materiality of infrastructural connections, the evolution of large technical systems, hardware arrangements, software codes, and patterns of interoperability. In the case of the sites investigated in the Logistical Worlds project, this focus extends the parameters of Asian regionalism beyond their usual boundaries. The Asia in Europe or the Asia in Latin America become just as relevant as the Asia in China or India. Yet, because logistics is not merely a means of organizing commercial activates but also a political technology that produces subjectivity and power, this patterning of space assumes a properly political form. Aside from the interests of states or regional organizations, therefore, such expressions of polity and their associated media forms define the limits and connective properties of capital's operations. While it is important not to reduce capitalism to logistics" and to measure its transformations, mutations, and effects against those produced by other prominent fields of capitalist activity, such as finance and extraction" these are the circuits of infrastructure, software, and labour that make logistical worlds.