Supply chain criticism: Seam, interval, hold

The emergence of the supply chain as a site of critical inquiry follows the tendency in humanities and social sciences to position key social and environmental conflicts in the logistical infrastructures where raw materials, commodities, and bulk energy supplies circulate at startling magnitudes. This article positions supply chains as important sources of differentiation internal to the logistical field, and considers the standardized moments of supply chains as the site, method, and object of infrastructural study. To do so we offer a review of the recent scholarly literature on the critical, aesthetic, and environmental affordance of tending to scenes of logistical circulation and their significance for what we are terming “supply chain criticism.” In configuring geometries of supply chain capital as primary sites of both economic and ecological causality, we argue that reading the logics of this causality is at minimum necessary for any hermeneutic invested in mitigating, repurposing, or abolishing its flows. Thinking from the specifically aquatic spaces that connect most supply chains to one another, we open by offering a set of methodological terms for humanities scholars to consider in order to read the “seam,” the “interval,” and the “hold” of maritime capital. We then trace these sites in relation to our ongoing experience of logistics fieldwork around the ports of the North Sea. This particular economic and environmental milieu has required us to adopt a situated ethic of theorization, one that draws us into affective proximity the material frictions and flux of otherwise abstract flows. Adopting a rhythmic reading practice that runs counter to clean aesthetics of supply chains, we consider how the calibration of space, time, and volume is central to how supply chains are managed, made, and remade across distinct tempos and terrains, concluding that if logistical power is reproduced through the strategic inflection of friction and difference, then these tensions can be productively harnessed in the creation of different social practices and forms of life.