containers and their others

 

i planned to come to class. i had a few things i had to get done before coming, so i planned on arriving late, hoping not to miss too much while at the same time hoping to feel how it can work for subjectivities to cut in at the middle, and be cut upon by entering by that middle.
    I left my roost and headed for the train tracks where i like to cross towards the metro station. But for the first time for me since moving to Montreal, the track was occupied by the distributed embodiment of logistics: a train packed with cargo containers. It was not lost on me that as I endeavored to get to a class discussing Saidaya Hartman’s work on the slave route and its afterlife, here its afterlife blocked me. Containerization, Moten and Harney hold, is the afterlife of the movement technologies developed for the slave trade. And they flourish everywhere around us. Train car after train car passed in front of me. Each container painted with its parent-company’s name. Some were simple, just metal boxes; some were endowed with more complex abilities, keypads, automated thermostats, cooling fans, and heating engines. I thought of Hartman’s lines about the lack of documentation for cargo, human or otherwise, precisely because they were preconstituted, first and foremost, as cargo unable to be animated or yet to be so. I thought of the lost stories she sought as i noted that the containers, like the carrying hull of the slaver, were windowless. Commodities do not need windows because they are not thought to be conscious of their circumstances. If they were conscious, enlightened, transformed by the transcendentality of reason, then they would need a window. So the logic goes that if commodities ask or even demand a window before they have received transcendental reason, then they are ungrateful for what they have.
    After the trainline passed, i moved across. I move to the metro, bought a container of fermented beverage, and paid my entry way into another embodiment of logistics. But I was blocked again, the metro was blocked, estimated at a 20 minute arrival time. At this point it began to sink in that class was already happening out here, too, with you all. I thought about how the underground metro car was meant to carry cargo deemed reasonable, human, and that every metro car therefore had windows, even when it was driving mostly through the dark. And I thought how it wasn’t quite so simple; the afterlife of slave routes has mutated its technologies, and the analytics of raciality continue to be employed without only the color line as explicit rubric. The trace of the route is here in the strategies of metro-movement, too, even as it tries to perform its acceptance (engulfment) of all into its movement. But there is nothing bitter for me about the metro, it is merely annoying, it cannot be compared to the carnage of the slave route and the slave route continuing today. It is unfortunately easy to metaphorize, compare, and contrast logisticality and/as slave route (or perhaps easy for whiteness to do). Rather the metro merely shows how the trace of racial capitalism iterates on what has worked for those with interests, those able (considered able) to have interests, and that it is content to iterate those technologies across a gradient of biological entities, using their historical value as guide for how much needs to be spent on the innards of the container. Maybe its enough to say the technologies of racial capitalism are continuing to grow and spread in likely and unlikely places. I think about the plenum and wonder how to jam with it here
    So after a pause, I turned heel and retraced my path, trying to think the infrastructure as I passed over it (I’m sure the metro has come and gone by now) and under it (the van horne overpass leaks water and oil) and over again, through the break in the fence, where no sight of the train remained--But thinking onto the tracks that, if i laid my ear to them, i could perhaps hear the thrum of the train engines working to carry the cargo (the weight of its inventory) to its destination and its containers to their next port of emptying and refilling. And the thrum of what else?