Making logistical worlds

Logistics makes worlds. What are the stakes of this claim? First, it indicates that logistics is productive. This may seem a truism for, at least in current dominant understandings, logistics is deeply implicated in capitalist production, where it is defined (in handbooks and management manuals) as the art and science of getting the right thing to the right place at the right time. Undoubtedly, the techniques and technologies that undergird logistics as a system of communication and transport have their productive sides because, in the current wave of globalization, the organization of supply chains and production networks has been a central feature: stretching out production across time and space, facilitating a constant movement of goods, people, and information across sites, trading labour costs against transport costs, and, in doing so, eroding the distinction between production and circulation. But to claim that logistics makes worlds is to say something more than that logistics makes commodities, supply chains, or even globalizing patterns of interconnection. At base it is an ontological claim, and it is in this sense that we use it to explore the making of a world region.