Today, I ask myself: What is the relation of improvisation and choreologistics? Therefore, to start with, a citation from the book ‘Operational Logistics: The Art and Science of Sustaining Military Operations’ by Moshe Kress. (It also points to the question: Where do logistics originally come from? For the origins of logistics lie within the military domain. Something, I will look into more deeply.) But here it comes:

“Operations are very seldomly executed as planned. The German theoretician Van Clausewitz attributed this statement to the effect of friction. Friction at the battlefield exists even when there is no enemy around. It is created by fatigue, fear, misunderstanings among commanding officers, misinterpretation of commands, shortfalls in C3 systems, technical failure of weapons, and the effects of the elements. Therefore, commanders must be capable to alter, sometimes at very short notice, existing operational plans. In particular, the operational logistician may have to find fasts and effective solutions to emerging unpredicted logistical requirements. In many cases he must improvise.

Generally speaking, improvisation is more prevalent at the tactical logistics level than at the operational level. Improvisation is typically manifested as a local iniative to solve an ad hoc problem. However, despite its tactical and local level, the effect of an improvised solution may extend beyond the tactical level and have an impact on the entire operation. For example, changing quickly and effectively the original designation of certain means of transportation may facilitate supply of a critical resource that otherwise could not have reached the destination where it is needed.

The potential capability for improvisation depends on a flexible logistic structure (…) and reliable and updated information (…) regarding the availability of resources. The ability to improvise also depends on the mental creativity of the campaign commanders and logisticians, and on the command and control capabilities. It should be pointed out that improvisation does not replace foresight; it complements it when things do not happen as anticipated.

[Example 3.20

The Allies invasion in northwestern Europe during WWII required that large amounts of supplies be transported onto the continent. The Germans, aware of the need for deep-water ports by the Allies, fortified every major port on the French and Belgian shores. To facilitate the mass transportation of supplies, the Allies created artificial harbors from sunken ships, concrete boxes (caissons), and pontoons. The improvisation effort of getting supplies across the Normady breaches was crucial for Allies’ success.]” (p. 53)

It seems that choerologistics tries to avoid improvisation wherever possible. But it knows full well that it will always have to rely upon it. Full logistical optimisation, total choreologisticality, may always be a fantasy. Something similar is expressed by Kate Hepworth in her article ‘Enacting logistical geographies’ (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, vol. 32, pp.1120-34) where she seems to define the logistical city as unattainable ideal. What does it do? “Through the rationalisation and optimisation of the relationship between sites to achieve maximum efficiency in storage capacity, distribution, and manufacture, logistics enacts new geographies of organisational integration and dispersal.” Yet, the movement of optimisation results in a conflict, or struggle. Hepworth argues, that what comes into focus, really, is “the messiness and tensions embodied in the encounter between the ideal, logistical city and the lived spaces of a particular no longer industrial city.”

She highlights the constitutively paradoxical nature of logisticality. For one, while the logistic city is fully integrated with all sorts of other flows, operations and systems, it also becomes more and more dispersed: “As an assemblage, the logistical city exceeds particular urban localities. It embeds particular localities in material, discursive and symbolic relations that link them to more or less distant sites and jurisdictions. (…)”It hints at what Timothy Morton, in his book on Hyperobjects, calls nonlocality. The logistical city is described as a “sociomaterial entity” that forges “relational processes that can be engaged in by human and nonhuman actors”. But the most disturbing aspect of logisticality maybe is the temporality that is enact and enforces: “The present state of the assemblage is always understood in relation to historical and potential future formations.”

Let me then sum up the constitutive paradoxes that I find in these two texts cited here. One is spatial: choreologistics is always already more than local. This constitutive nonlocality has two aspects: While it forges relations and connections to distant places and systems, it constantly distributes, re-distributes and dilutes locality to the point is seems to become non-existent. Logistics seem to fade in an out of the terrain. Secondly, choreologisticality seem to produce an ambivalent temporality: While processes need to be transparent, secured and managed to the optimal here and now, while it claims a rigid presentism, choreologistics constantly projects a future ideal of even great optimisation according to which any now has to be measured, for “(…) the encounter between the already existing city and the ideal logistical city can only ever result in partial optimisation.” (all citations p.1121/2) It seems, thus, that choreologisticals can never really arrive anywhere or any time.

Finally, then, between the ideal future optimum that consist in total distributedness – a total space-time control, a total extension both in time and space – and the actual reality of the here and now of however small and particular actions or movements from which the overall choreologistic operational matrix ist composed, the gap seems to become bigger and bigger. The infinite distance – both temporally and spatially – between the ultimate ideal choreologistic protocol, program, chain of operations or diagram, managed for an infinitely distant vantage point, and the reality of the field needs to be bridged by an infinitely recursive process of control. Logistics and improvisation. Any movement, at any time and any place, needs to be monitored, documented and analyzed so that whatever small portion of fraction, messiness or deviance it carries into the choreologistical matrix can be dealt with and incorporated by means of recalibrating. Thus, the need for a total flexibility of choreologistics.

I get dizzy even when trying to think about this, or while writing it down. Suffice maybe to say that total choreologisticality necessarily remains a fiction. Something similar, then, seems to be expressed by Moten and Harney in their book The Undercommons: “The […] transport of things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition.” (p. 92)

 

Hier ein weiteres vorläufiges Strategiepapier, diesmal auf Deutsch. Muss noch überarbeitet werden. (Außerdem habe ich heute an der ‘Companion Species’-Ecke gearbeitet.)

 

CENTER FOR CHOREOLOGISTICAL EMPATHY (Trademark)

– Strategiepapier –

Ausgangspunkt:

In zunehmendem Maße ist unsere Welt durch logistische Abläufe und Choreographien gekennzeichnet.

Das Schiff ist der wichtigste Leistungsträger der Globalisierung, und der Container sein technologischer Nukleus. Der globale Schifffahrtsverkehr hat sich seit den 1970er-Jahren vervierfacht, und ca. 90 % unserer Alltags-Güter werden heute über den Seeweg transportiert. In dem Maße, in dem die Schiff­fahrt wächst und sich damit der Frachtpreis pro Container verringert, in dem sich Ladezeiten durch die einfachere und zunehmend automatisierte Handhabung von Containern verkürzen, in dem die Trans­portkosten für Güter also radikal sinken, können einzelne Produktionsschritte an unterschiedliche Orte der Welt ausgelagert werden. Die ganze Welt wird ein einziges, zusammengesetztes, aber eng ver­bundenes globales Fließband.

Die Ausdehnung und Organisation von weltumspannenden Wertschöpfungsketten, die in zunehmen­dem Maße über das Internet organisiert und kontinuierlich über GPS und AIS – das sog. Automatische Identifikationssystem, das durch den Austausch von Navigations- und anderen Schiffsdaten weltweit die Sicherheit und die Lenkung des Schiffsverkehrs verbessert – kontrolliert und überwacht werden, und die zugleich Geographien und Lebenswelten konstituieren, entzieht sich weitgehend dem Wissen und der Wahrnehmung von Bürger_innen westlicher Großstädte. Oft ist nicht transparent, an welchen Orten und in welchen Arbeitsschritten Waren gefertigt, und wie viele Transportkilometer dafür zurück­gelegt werden müssen. Für ein einzelnes Sakko (made in Bangladesh) fahren Schiffe 48.000 km, mehr als zwei mal um die Weltkugel, und das zum Preis von einem U-Bahn-Ticket: Die Baumwolle stammt aus den USA, wird aber in Indien gewebt und gefärbt. Die Knöpfe werden in Vietnam gefertigt, aus Plastik, das aus Europa stammt, das aber in China verarbeitet wird. Die Herkunftskennzeichnung markiert nur die letzte Station eines weitverzweigten Netzwerks. Um diese globalen Netzwerke von Produktion und Wertschöpfung am Laufen zu halten, sind viele Reisekilometer notwendig, eine immer aufwendigere, virtuelle Steuerung, und genaue, zeitkritische Planung.

Zugleich ist Logistik mehr als der Transport und die Verteilung von Waren. Logistisches Denken be­zeichnet die prozess-orientierte Logik, die die Konzeption, Produktion und Verteilung von Waren als Flüsse versteht, deren Dichte und Geschwindigkeit stetig gemessen, kontrolliert, gemanagt und optimiert wer­den müssen. Damit Rohstoffe, Komponenten, Waren und Arbeitskraft nie zum Stillstand kommen, un­terliegen deren Bewegungen immer komplexeren, verschalteten Choreographien. Dinge und Menschen dürfen nie stillstehen, sie müssen jederzeit überwacht werden, damit sie stets zum rechten Zeit am rechten Ort geliefert, weiterverarbeitet, in Dienst genommen oder konsumiert werden können.

Sowohl in den voll-automatisierten Abläufen eines Containerterminals, als auch in den virtuellen Pla­nungswelten des Wertschöpfungsketten-Managements, das heute weitgehend die globale Choreo­graphie von Waren und Gütern bestimmt, scheint der menschliche Körper nebensächlich zu sein. Ein großes Containerschiff, beispielsweise, das etwa 18.000 Container transportieren kann, wird heute von einer Crew von weniger als 25 Männer und Frauen betreut und gesteuert. Ein solche Schiff liegt weni­ger als 36 Stunden im Hafen, um ent- und wieder beladen zu werden, bevor es wieder ablegt. Mensch­liche Sinne reichen nicht aus, um die gigantischen Dimensionen eines Hafenterminals, eines Container­schiffes oder einer globalen Wertschöpfungskette noch wirklich sinnlich zu erfassen oder zu verarbei­ten. Zu­gleich wird menschliche Arbeit in diesen logistischen Welten mehr und mehr überflüssig, oder – wo sie unersetzlich ist – immer stärker von den Zeitabläufen und Logiken eines nie stillstehenden Gü­terflusses bestimmt. In logistischen Abläufen wird menschliche Leistungsfähigkeit und Arbeitseffizienz, mehr noch als am Fordschen Fließband, gegliedert, fragmentiert, differenziert, vermessen und dem Imperativ des logistischen ‘performance measurement’ unterworfen.

Arbeitsfeld:

Die hier aufgebaute Forschungs-Installation untersucht folgende These: Zunehmend nimmt das Voka­bular des Choreographischen Einzug in logistische Diskurse, vor allem um die immer größer werdende Komplexität und Ausdehnung von miteinander verschalteten Arbeitsprozessen zu beschreiben. Daran anschließend, wird Logistik in dieser Installation explizit als die Erfindung, schrittweise Implementierung und Steuerung von menschlicher und vor allem nicht-menschlicher Bewegung als zu beherrschender Fluss, als komplexes choreo­graphisches Dispositiv also, verstanden. Untersucht wird die Ästhetik und die Bewegungslogik von Lo­gistik, zunächst im Bezug auf den Container, auf Containerterminals und Containerschifffahrt.

An Hand einer puzzle-artigen Zusammenstellung von somatischen und tänzerischen Praktiken, von Video- und Soundarbeiten, von installativen Objekten, und mit Hilfe einer kleinen For­schungsbibliothek wird nach dem Verhältnis des menschlichen Körpers zu choreologistischer Infrastuk­tur gefragt. Wie kann, im Angesicht der immensen Größe und ein­schüchternden ästhetischen Erhabenheit von logistischen Bewegungen, Architekturen und Geo­graphien, ein körperlicher Zugang zu diesen erprobt oder erarbeitet werden? Gesucht wird nach der Möglichkeit von Empathie sowohl mit den Arbeiter_innen logistischer Welten, als auch mit den von ihnen transportier­ten und bewegten Dingen. Ein Verständnis von und Erfahrungswerte mit logistischen Choreographien sind Bedingung einer schrittweisen Auseinandersetzung mit den Arbeitswelten, dem Dingbegriff, der Ideologie und der Ästhetik globaler Logistik. An dieser bürgerlich-emanzipatorischen Schwelle versucht die Installation ein fragmentiertes Erfahrungsfeld zu eröffnen, das seine Wirkkraft aber gerade nicht aus der unmittelbaren physischen Nähe zur Logistik erhält, sondernd deren Logik insofern übernimmt, als sie mit Methoden der Abstraktion und Virtualität arbeitet. Die Installation materialisiert eine vorsichtig forschende Bewegung und versteht sich als Experimentierfeld.

Ein Standard-Container als 3-D Druck (gedruckt gestern mit Hilfe von Axel Sylvester im FabLab St.Paulo). Wird der 3-D Drucker eines Tages den Container ersetzen?

Hennig Vöpel (HWWI) spricht unter Anderem auch davon:

http://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Hafen-Hamburg-braucht-neue-Standortstrategie,elbvertiefung618.html

Inventing the CENTER for CHOREOLOGISTIC EMPATHY [privisional]

Sieben Stationen (siehe Bild oben):

1. Welcome
2. 3-D Printing // Modeling a container depot algorithm
3. Hypnosis // Experiencing logistical movements
4. Video // On the aesthetic sublime of logistical infrastructure
5. Library // Individual reading time
6. Dancing // The fluid body and the sound of ship engines
7. Feedback

Danach: zurück zu 1.

Die Frage ist dann: Wie können die sieben Stationen auf dem kürzesten Weg abgeschritten werden? Ein Grundproblem der Logistik: The Travelling Salesman Problem

To learn more about it, check this out:

Tag Eins meiner Forschungs-Installation auf Kampnagel. Nachdem ich mich heute morgen eingerichtet und einige Aufträge rausgegeben habe, folgt hier der Versuch einer ersten, vorläufigen Definition von Choreologistics (unvollständig). Zunächst auf Englisch (zu übersetzen in den nächsten Tagen).

(Mein Mittagessen habe ich mit Stäbchen gegessen. Darauf zu lesen: BAMBOO CHOPSTICKS, PRODUCT OF CHINA. Ich frage mich: Mit welchem Schiff sind die Stäbchen hier hin gekommen. Und: Woher kommt der Bambus? Wurde das Rohmaterial auch in China extrahiert, oder vielleicht doch in Pakistan, um dann wiederum mit dem Schiff nach China transportiert zu werden? Wer hat die Papierhülle gefertigt, wer hat sie bedruckt? Wo wurde sie gefertigt, wo wurde sie bedruckt?)

…

What is CHOREOLOGISTICS?

Choreologistics is an invented term that hints at the common logics of logistics and choreography. It claims that logistics can be viewed and understood as a large-scale, economic choreography, one that is so big that we cannot fully perceive nor understand it any more.

Yet, logistics, to me, is already more than just an economic sector, it is more than only the distribution or transport of materials or commodities. Rather, choreologistics describes the logic according to which, today, all economic processes are managed and interwoven on a time-critical level. Not only do goods need to be transported over large distances, but, more and more, they need to arrive at the right place exactly at the right time. Any component, including information, needs to be delivered just in time. This is what is called real-time enterprise (for the old-school choreographers: the modern-time, large-scale commercial equivalent of real-time composition). Real-time enterprise produces and distributes its products right in time for the consumers’ demand. It must be able to fulfill orders no sooner or later than at the exact moment that they are needed. Suchlike choreologistical processes allow to minimize shelf time, be it in development, in the production process, or in the shop itself. As Clare Lyster writes in the current issue of Harvard Design Magazine (Fall/Winter 2016): “In the logisticalization of contemporary supply chains, shelf life is planned to be as brief as possible—storage does not accumulate in one place; rather, it flows.“ (Clare Lyster, ‘Storage Flows: Logistics as Urban Choreography’, 2016)

Choreologistics is fueled by this imagination of seamless, frictionless circulation of materials, machines, goods, objects, commodities, information, and human labor, desire, subjectivity, and imagination. Everything seems to be submitted to an ultimate command of fluidity. In choreologistics (finally, after all these years we have been reading Deleuze) just about any thing will be considered flow, traveling through more and more smooth spaces, where noisy or costly interfaces or bottlenecks try to be eradicated. “Designing and coordinating systems of flow is the central task of logistics; and in the commercial realm, logistical thinking deploys time-space planning methods to optimize operational flow and to cut costs.“ (Clare Lyster, ‘Storage Flows: Logistics as Urban Choreography’, 2016)

All these flows, from the flow of (financial or speculative) capital, the extraction of minerals, the refinement of material, the production of components, the assembly of the final product, including the global transport and circulation that takes place between each of these single steps, and the information flow that is needed for the production and distribution process, to the consumer data that monitors, analyzes and predicts future demands, need to be orchestrated and synchronized so that never will anything rest, or depart from its predicted course, never does it digress or deviate, aberrate, swerve or fall, drift or fail, vary or differ. Any of those transversal movements need to be minimized or at least calculated and insured in detailed risk-management-processes.

Also, one can easily imagine how consumption and expenditure – the consumer side of the business – and the waste that is produced both by business and consumption have already or will soon be included into these algorithmic, mathematic models, so that the choreographed supply chain comes to be interfaced with its counterpart – modeled and managed as the demand chain – to form a full circle. After all, that is what capital may be looking for: fully functioning, cost-efficient, CO2-neutral choreologistic loops, where nothing is wasted, but where value is produced at any step of the loop. In effect, the perfect order, mimicking God-like or natural cycles of production and decay, may then be put in place. Paradise 2.0. And in order to do so, not only does the flow of goods need to be totally managed and adjusted to our demands, but our demand, our desires and subjectivities, too, need to become transparent, to the point where they can be fully predicted and supervised, for them to be matched to whatever is supplied to us, just in time.

Another ultimate fantasy of such choreologistical operations may be 3-D printing. In 3-D printing, anything can stay information flow up until the moment that it is actually needed locally. Only whenever needed for consumption or use will information (the ‘informe’, the formless) have to materialize into concrete objects. “Rather than outsourcing fabrication and assembly to locations around the world, companies would then design and produce locally using 3-D technology to manufacture components and parts for a range of industries as well as commodities, from furniture to toys, for public consumption. That production, distribution, and delivery would no longer be merely integrated but combined into a simultaneous operation would certainly guarantee even faster turnaround times. (Clare Lyster, ‘Storage Flows: Logistics as Urban Choreography’, 2016) The question just remains: How can we make products that fully decompose once they are not needed any more?

In ‘The Refusal to Choreograph and its Movement: The Subaltern Path’ choreographer Paz Rojo writes: ‘It seems that we continue living according to movements which guarantee the reproduction of a choreography from which it is impossible to escape the promise of economic value and our potential for sale. On the surface of this situation our affective, cognitive and sensible capacities increasingly adopt the mechanics of a totalizing yet supposedly free choreography which makes us work (move) in a multitude of flexible networks, whose logics such as visibility, accumulation, development, connectivity, self-representation, communicability and constant mobility, not only choreograph our subjectivity, but also tell us that any attempt to work for or against them results in a futile gesture.’ (from: ‘Bodies of Evidence. A Reader’, edited by Sandra Noeth) Now, include the working of infrastructure and the movement of goods and services managed by logistics into the picture, i.e. take into view the material conditions for any such total and free choreography, and you may end up with choreologistics.

Afterwards, Rojo distinguishes two definitions of movement, one being movement that ‘produces exchange value’, the other being movement ‘that is able to trigger transformative experiences and the production of change’. According to her, the second category of movements ‘proposes a process whereby we assume the subordinated condition of our capitalist subjectivity and consequently understand that the refusal to be choreographed or to choreograph others is an active part of movement itself.’ To escape capitalist total choreography, a crucial strategy for Rojo is to let oneself be in ‘the movement of things’ while refusing ‘to choreograph’. In fact, choreologistics takes into views mechanisms in which already things themselves, their movement, production and circulation – at least in as much as they become commodities – is highly choreographed and in constant ex- and interchange with human labor, desire and subjectivity where both of the sides – human and non-human – constantly influence and re-model one-another.

Then, many questions remain. Today, on the first day of my research at K3 – Center for Choreography in Hamburg, mine are:

• If logistics – as the fantasy of an all-encompassing global choreography of materials and desire that comprises production, distribution, consumption and decay – escapes our imagination, how can it still be felt, how can it be perceived, taken into view, become sensorial or tangible, how can it be grasped, touched,  perforated or cut?

• In how far does an understanding of logistics as choreography really help us to further explain its ways of working and the logics of what has recently be called ‘the logistical turn’ of capitalism?

• On the other hand: If logistics speaks of supply chain choreography, or self-terms itself as a choreographed dance, what really are the notions of choreography that are at play in these discourses?

• How do choreologistical worlds look like, how do their geographies and ecologies feel like?

• And how, finally, could a ‘refusal to be choreographed or to choreograph other’ look like, in or against choreologistical terms? Can we place the body, the thingly material back into the picture? What does it mean to do so?