project notes for residency at Cemeti - Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; tentatively titled - can i nongkrong on ritalin?
Where did logistics get this ambition to connect bodies, objects, affects, information, without subjects, without the formality of subjects, as if it could reign sovereign over the informal, the concrete and generative determinacy of material life? The truth is, modern logistics was born that way. Or more precisely it was born in resistance to, given as the acquisition of, this ambition, this desire and this practice of the informal. Modern logistics is founded with the first great move- ment of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave.
the mass migrations of industrialisation in the Americas, to the in-
dentured slaves from India, China, and Java, to the trucks and boats
leading north across the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, to one-
way tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or Bangladesh to
Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not ‘free’ labor.
Logistics remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the
movement of things. And the transport of things remains, as ever, lo-
gistics’ unrealizable ambition.
- -fred moten
