poster

Spaces of action and decision making The 'Routinisation' of Time-Space: Issues of Stability and 'Black-Boxing' in relation to the Shipping Container

Craig Martin

        
Biography

Craig Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Contextual Studies at University College for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom, where his teaching covers issues in design theory and material culture on undergraduate and postgraduate design courses. His research interests are in communicative networks, design and material culture, cultural geography and social theory. Currently these are focussed on issues of mobility and logistical space. He is also currently carrying out research in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway University of London, where he is investigating the materialities of distributive space and post-Structuralist movement, elaborated, in part, through the work of the philosopher Michel Serres. Conference papers have been delivered on a range of topics including spatial heterotopias, viral communication, logistical space, and Serresian approaches to writing.

Abstract

The primary focus of this text is the means through which the standardizing tendencies of global capitalist time-space reflect a shift in the ordering and standardisation of knowledge, or rather the elimination of difference or multiplicity. It will be argued that the means through which this process of standardization occurs is through a means of 'routinisation'1 of time-space partly inscribed by the twin roles of visibility and invisibility, specifically in terms of the blankness of form that we associate with that 'vehicle' of global capital – the shipping container.
In itself the material form that the shipping container takes is rather innocuous. Its key features are its regularity (it comes in four standard sizes – ten, twenty, thirty and forty foot variations, but most typically the twenty and forty foot sizes dominate) and its ubiquity, the sheer number that proliferate throughout the world – currently some 300 million of them circumvent the globe2 Perhaps its most telling feature is blankness, it is a closed space; there is little to the container in terms of how it confronts the viewer, nothing to identify its contents. As these blank boxes traverse rail and road networks we are left to wonder at what is being carried. We see nothing. The quantity of containers highlights the importance of standardisation, both of the unit itself but also the logistical infrastructure behind their movements. For the operation of global commodity movement is predicated on a highly attuned inter-modal system, one that requires the seamless transference between different elements of the system, be that from truck to crane to ship, highlighting the specific context of this debate in relation to contemporary questions of mobility. The present paper sets out, with mobility as its ever-present theme, to investigate the relationship between the standardising processes of containerisation, the notion of infrastructural inter-changeability and the twofold role of visibility. These aims are developed by considering the relationship between 'foreground' and 'background', that is, respectively, the standardised form of the container itself and the logistical infrastructure that 'powers' this movement. The opening discussion concerns the role of containerisation, its regularity of form and the move toward a packaging of efficiency through 'black-boxing', before moving on to the importance of 'visibility' outlined in relation to commodity movement and the inter-changeability of time-space, again with reference to the routinisation of 'black-boxing' and the drive toward spatial and temporal stability. A key facet of this text is the way in which these aspects portray the distributive phase of commodity culture as 'natural'.