Ari Sariannidis ~ Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Gloom of Night ~ February 1st, 2018

"To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption. Only a short time ago many of us said work went through the subject to exploit our social capacities, to wring more labor power from our labor.

There have always been other ways to put bodies to work, even to maintain the fixed capital of such bodies. And anyway for capital the subject has become too cumbersome, too slow, too prone to error, too controlling, to say nothing of too rarified, too specialized a form of life. But today we are prompted to ask: why worry about the subject at all, why go through such beings to reach the general intellect? And why limit production to subjects, who are after all such a small part of the population, such a small history of mass intellectuality. Yet it is not we who ask this question. This is the automatic, insistent, driving question of the field of logistics.

The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere. In military science the world has been turned upside down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logistics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters."