Techniques of Assembly

This is a preprint of an article that appeared in Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies.

Cultural techniques, as Bernhard Siegert conceives them, are the “operative chains that precede the media concepts they generate.” Media may determine our situation, Friedrich Kittler once suggested, but they do so under circumstances already existing, encoded in them long in the past. Moving from the emphasis of early German media studies on technology towards an elaboration of the technical, the study of “cultural techniques” continues a Kittlerian interest in the examination of “elementary acculturation techniques” by enrolling not only “inconspicuous technologies of knowledge” like index cards, but the “discourse operators” and “disciplining techniques” like quotation marks and alphabetization they require.¹ As such, it suggests a media-archaeological analysis less focused on the material infrastructures of “media” than it is their underlying operators and practices. It exchanges, in other words, an ontological interest in “devices, objects, or systems” with the “ontic operations” that – as Liam Cole-Young puts it – allow us to observe “the means by which humans and tools assemble basic categories of space, time and being.”² Given that media archaeology is not a singular method, but a series of related approaches to “‘excavating’ media-cultural phenomena,” a media archaeology grounded in the investigation of these operations posits a mode of inquiry that considers cultural practices as they are in the process of becoming cultural concepts, unearthing the very moments where they came into contact with the social and material developments that would ultimately inscribe them into technological and mediative being.³

A similar sort of development has taken place in the critical study of logistics. Early attachments to technologies of logistical operation like the cargo container or assembly line have developed into questions about the operative formation of logistical concepts, perhaps the most salient of which is the supply chain itself. So, while the contemporary incarnation of the supply chain may be most present in media technologies like the logistical software systems that organize the infrastructures of global logistical operation, scholars such as Deborah Cowen, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten have been drawn to its more ideological origins amid the battlefield of Waterloo or the movements of the Middle Passage.⁴ This speaks, I suggest, to the need for a greater understanding of the underlying techniques which precede these origins. Not, for example, the container, but – as Alexander Klose suggests – containment.⁵ Not the assembly line, I argue here, but assembly. John Durham Peters has written of “logistical media” as those media forms which “arrange people and property into time and space.”⁶ Indeed, while discussions of this idea may treat seemingly mundane and “inconspicuous” media forms like calendars, radar, and global positioning systems, it is with a similar sort of “technical” sensibility that they often consider these forms before, as well as after, their more material constitution. Radar, for example, becomes a technology that instantiates emergent techniques of orientation, and the calendar one of many tools (like clocks) that results from the drive to index and order human temporality.

The chaîne opératoire is an archaeological model introduced by André Leroi-Gourhan to acknowledge that “technique is both motion and tool,” forming a “chain” that gives operations “their rigidity and their adaptability.” Catherine Perlès has elaborated on this idea, articulating the approach as a “succession of mental operations and technical gestures,” a definition which Frédéric Sellet frames as “aim[ing] to describe and understand all cultural transformations that a specific raw material had to go through.”⁷ Conveniently for us, the last several decades have seen all of our artifacts as the result of one singular sort of process. The supply chain, after all, is the modern means of making, taking over from the workshop and wheelhouse, forge and factory. What would it look like to follow the chaîne opératoire of the supply chain’s operations, the movements not just of its materials, but its material practices? As Sharon Steadman writes, “methodologies based on the concept of chaîne opératoire implicitly employ semiotic methods that ‘may reveal the moments at which producers followed cultural rules, rules that were socialized and instilled into their bodies.’” They may also, one hopes, suggest those moments where they “made intentional choices to stray from or modify those rules.”⁸

Media archaeology should not be taken as archaeology, but this hasn’t kept it from finding a kind of eponymic inspiration there. And what is logistics if not a history of precisely this sort of bodily instillation? Its origin, either in the division of Africans by the chains of slavery or the multiplication of the soldier for grist in the mills of the Napoleonic wars, reveals a practice uniquely invested in techniques for the ordering and operationalization of the human body. The strictures of scientific management may have brought a renewed sense of rigor to the study of the worker’s bodily movements, both subtle and gross, but it was only because the “elementary acculturation techniques” responsible for the assembly of bodies in the factory had already made them so accessible. It is along the supply chaîne opératoire where we will find the links between the chains of slavery and of supply, where we find the hands of workers – of men, yes, but especially of women – their fingers and feet, as they are assembled in new configurations alongside newly constituted objects. In a media archaeology of logistical media, we must begin by following those operations that will precede the logistical concepts they will produce. And we will find here not only the “technical actions that transform raw materials,” but the “social and ideological concepts” that have enabled their fabrication.⁹

With this in mind, this article examines the origins not only of the media that underlie logistical operation, but the techniques that have shaped and structured them. To do so, I focus on the logistical technique of assembly. Not just of parts, but of places and people. Assembly, here, becomes an ur-mediative technique, one produced both before and beside the attendant media functions of storage and transmission. Long before its instantiation in the operations of contemporary software systems, I examine how this logistical technique emerged in the confines of sites like the ancient storehouse. As I do, I consider how the abstract forms of mediation developed there made warehouses accessible as a new kind of virtual assembly, precipitating the instrumental order critical to the operation of the global supply chain.

Meanings of Media

Modern media are the product of global supply chains, as are the images they encode and the sounds they compress. Even the simplest media forms are complex logistical productions. Phonograph records, Lisa Gitelman writes, “depended on a worldwide trade in materials” that gathered materials like “German chemicals and Indian lac,” just as they did oversized objects like “recording artists, recording studios, and phonograph and gramophone deals.”¹⁰ Marshall McLuhan went so far as to suggest that certain modes of assembly produced certain kinds of media. Despite the “electric qualities” that had inspired Edison, the phonograph, he argued, was “a product of industrial, assembly-line organization and distribution.” Other mediums, too, were the result of their own particular techniques of assembly. Both electric telegraphy and block printing had been necessary to create the “strange new form” of the modern newspaper, a form he described as a sort of “telegraph press” produced with a “surrealistic mosaic of bits…in vivid interaction.” And how could it not be that the assembly line itself was at play in the assembly “of still shots on celluloid”? Techniques for mechanical movement and the projection of electric light were joined to create the “illusion of motion,” just as the techniques of positioning and drawing had been combined to create the “illusion of perspective” years before.¹¹ Assembly is not just what is gathered. It is a process of differentiation, of sorting, of like-ness and unlike-ness. It is the production of similarity, as much as it is its recognition. The film’s frames became continuous because they were assembled, just as cuts became cohesive and notes became harmonious. There is always something more than what was originally gathered – a “slight surprise” in the action of assembly.¹²

Media are assemblies. But, Jonathan Sterne warns, they “are not like suitcases,” and “images, sounds, and moving pictures are not like clothes…they have no existence apart from their containers and from their movements – or the possibility thereof.”¹³ While Sterne’s direction is to rebuke critiques that imagine the separability of form from “content,” it nevertheless serves to remind that, in many ways, media are exactlylike suitcases. They are containers for cargo. Filled with images, sounds, words, and thoughts, they carry their content through time and space. This is no less true, as it is for most modern media, if the container proves inseparable from what’s placed within it. While one might be able to “hold a film reel up to the sun and see what every frame shows,” the electronic signals of television, Friedrich Kittler reminds us, are accessible only “at the beginning and end of the transmission chain.”¹⁴ Media are a container that “transforms as it holds,” an “apparatus” that defines the system of relations between elements.¹⁵ Indeed, even if one could separate out the corroded mass of media supply chains into their constituent components, the result will just be just some McLuhan-esque mixture. In the irreducibility of this gathering we find the real demands of media archaeological practice – that disassembled media are meaningless precisely because the work of mediation had always been in the unique assembly of the assembled. There is no message apart from the medium, and so there is no medium apart from the message.¹⁶

This provocation has prefigured much of the contemporary concern with the materiality of media, just as it has driven us to questions about the nature of the mediative operation. In their consideration of media that “arrange people and property into time and space,” scholars such as John Durham Peters, Judd Case, and Ned Rossiter have returned to those media that, like McLuhan’s best examples, do not seem to have “content.” These “logistical media,” are the media of “orientation,” devices of cognitive, social, and political coordination (and control) like “lighthouses, clocks, global positioning systems, temples, maps, calendars, telescopes, and highways.”¹⁷ They are not messages sent through the grid, Peters argues, they are “prior to and form the grid” through which messages will be sent. While he offers this description to differentiate logistical media from the “more obvious” sort that result from the functions of storage and transmission, Judd Case notes that this “grid-like functioning” gestures to the work of media theorists such as Harold Innis, James Carey, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Virilio.¹⁸ Logistical media, we come to understand, are not variables, not inputs or outputs. They are not what is inside the black box, nor what the black box is taken to be. They are not even the box. They are the assembly codes – the supply chains – that build the data structures of human knowledge, the algorithms of human culture, and the net code for human communication.¹⁹

The basic function of all media, I suggest, is this assembly. Media exist “to store and to expedite information,” and “to store,” McLuhan explains “is to expedite, since what is stored is also more accessible than what has to be gathered.”²⁰ The storage function of media direct new operations, just as the mechanics of transmission index new positions in preparation for them. Logistical techniques are revealed as mediative measures – new orientations requiring new media to not only make new marks, but for the space on which to mark out their meaning. To suggest that the medium is the message is to suggest only that all media are logistical, that all media not only operate in and through the grid, but constitute it.²¹ Media are not only assembled, in other words, but always already assembling.²² As such, they are not just material structures, but the very chains that link representations back to the real. Like supply chains, we can try to follow them back to where they had first begun, to the moments, materials, and, indeed, other mediums that were first responsible for their initial formulation. But once formed, we find that they have already altered what we had imagined their original objects to be.

Sites of Storage

The world is bound up in the supply chain. It moves from mines to factories to storefronts. But there are more dedicated sorts of gatherings. These are the fulfillment centers, depots, and warehouses, the assembliatoric grid which encases the Earth and which constitutes the storehouse of the supply chain. Things have no parliament – we are loath to let them assemble freely. So it is here they are gathered in preparation for their purpose, where their parts and pieces stand at the ready. This is where they will sit on the shelves that hold them for their allotted time. It is where they assemble, and it is where – opened and unassembled – they will return.

The storehouse is the first storage medium. It is present at the beginning of recorded history as it is the modern moment. The logic it orders was recognizable in the organization of Gutenberg’s workshop at Hof Humbrecht just as it would be for Amazon’s first warehouse in Seattle. And while books have given way to bits, the expansion of the storehouse to encompass video streams and cloud data has not altered its fundamental operation. It reflects only that storage has become increasingly complicated by successive media technologies that permit a virtual, rather than material, aggregation. As Wolfgang Ernst explains, even memory itself is no longer “derived from individual or social recollection,” but “from storage located in distributed computer farms.”²³ If knowledge is to be assembled by digital supply chains with only this, entirely uncertain, connection to the real, we are left to ask exactly what it was that was operationalized in the walling up of the warehouse, the setting aside of a space on the docks, and – now – the allocation of new blocks of bytes, and, tentatively, blocks of chains. What happened when things were first assembled not in space, but in minds, thought together as a new sort of object? Perhaps, as I will argue, it was their assembly in space which allowed them to be thought together in the first place.

If recognizing compression schemes, electric signals, and film reels as sites of assembly proves disconcerting, it is hardly so to acknowledge the mundane mediation of warehouses filled with linen rags and insect secretions. While stacks of servers may abstractly hold shows and songs in the cloud, and while laptops, tablets, and phones are stocked with things we still think of as films and photographs, the more familiar image of assembly is of a vast space lined with shelves. But the architectural form, and indeed the overriding logic of the structure, has always seemed more than a little mysterious. This is something that its rare representation in other media forms has borne out. The staggering scale of shelves stretching to a shrouded sky in the film Idiocracy offers a shorthand for a society where all the materials of existence have been already produced, compiled in preparation for their inevitable consumption. The shadowy site at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark is available only to the viewer, when the eponymous object is wheeled down endless aisles of artifacts – to be preserved, Dr. Jones is told, under the direction of “top men.”²⁴ The storehouse, these images suggest, can be both archive and marketplace, even as it can be data structure, city, silo, and slave ship. It is a form both exacting and expansive.²⁵

Though the terms are used interchangeably, a storehouse is not necessarily a warehouse. The former says nothing about the permanence of possessions, their economic expression, or purpose. As a place where commodities are kept, a warehouse is a specialized site of storage. It is the place for wares, for commodities and commerce, where shelves stand as way station between workshop and marketplace. The storehouse is less well defined. Documents as ancient as the Code of Hammurabi set standards for storage – outlining prices, regulations for deposit, and instructions for restitution if goods were damaged or destroyed.²⁶ The American Warehousemen’s Association imagined that the first of this form could be found in Egypt of the Old Testament, where Joseph, alone among magicians and mediums of the Egyptian court, had the answer to Pharaoh’s troubling dreams. Commanding grain be gathered from “those good years to come,” Joseph prepared for “the seven years of famine which shall be in the land of Egypt.” As the future came to pass, “his storage techniques” made him exalted – “second only to the Pharaoh.”²⁷ And so, in Pharaoh’s dreams, we have the beginning of our long logistical nightmare.

In his ambitious “History of the Warehouse Since 2200 B.C.,” H. H. Manchester reads Joseph’s supernatural semiotics in the context of a broader Egyptian cultural practice of “conservation.” Conservation, indeed, keenly captures the role of the storehouse in the ancient world. Storage was not the first stop on the supply chain, but an environmental response to the reliable, but irregular, flooding of the Nile. The media historian Harold Innis saw the material implications of this demand. With an “irregularity of overflow” came a “coordination of effort,” as “people, implements, and goods had to be gathered into the cities and towns.” The storage of supplies became a necessity; assembly a constant condition. The floods carried with them a “principle of order and centralization.” It found its enactment not only in the early storehouse, but in the records and regulations that mediated its operation. It is in the records of a governor of Egypt’s 6th Dynasty that we find the first reference to the construction of storehouses for grain, but certainly, Manchester suggests, others were already – or soon to be – in existence. While supply chains for Egyptian artisans did not yet require materials like tantalum or tungsten, by the time of Mentuhotep in the 12th Dynasty the technique had spread to encompass not only those particularly human interests of gold and silver, but depots and storehouses for metals like copper, iron, lead, and tin, or alloys like solder, bronze, and brass.²⁸

While the chain of operation that leads back to the shores of the Nile may seem to be a reasonable one to follow, this is not Manchester’s only suggestion for the origins of assembly’s early practice. Indeed, perhaps these origins cannot be found in the gathering of goods for life, but in the preservation of the body once that life was over. Burial practices like mummification, Manchester writes, may be the first cultural technique of assembly, and objects like sarcophagi may be their first technology. Like the cargo container, they too are a “time capsule.”²⁹ They gather in space what they will transmit throughout time, organizing the earthly materials necessary for the soul’s continued existence.³⁰ In this regard, sarcophagi, like most media of the dead, have proved a precarious proposition. Black boxes are leaky, after all.³¹ But in bringing grain and other goods together in the mortal world as spectral supply for the immortal one, funerary rites may very well be one of the first media-logistical operations—the priests who conducted them the first practitioners of supply chain management. What is valuable in this account is how it emphasizes the centrality of human, rather than nonhuman, actors, and ritualistic, rather than rational, acts.

The association of storage with ritual practice is echoed in John Durham Peters’ identification of towers, clocks, and calendars as logistical media forms. While all serve ritual functions, it is the humble calendar, Peters notes, that is the “oldest and most important of all religious media.” They too are administered by a priestly class. As “media that store time,” calendars are assembled to gather “the movements of planets [and] stars” alongside “human observation of them.” This proves critical to the account of Tycho Brahe that Bruno Latour and Elizabeth Eisenstein examine, as they consider the moment when Brahe will have before him “for the first time in history, all the predictions of the planetary movements.” As Eisenstein explains, he is not the first to look at the sky, “but [the first] to look simultaneously to all the former predictions and his own, written down together in the same form.”³² While Latour uses this assembly to speak to the study of science, Peters intends to explore the ways in which logistical media function as the foundation for more complex cultural practices. In the case of the calendar, Peters argues that religious allegiance and identity are both constructed out of techniques for synchronizing life “with the motions of the celestial spheres.” And just as calendars “preserve past time” to “project future time,” the storehouse’s rituals of conservation may yet prove fundamental to future media forms – even if it is not yet capable of such a grand assembly.³³

The conflicting origins of assembly that Manchester offers are not as contradictory as they appear. Indeed, as late as the Medieval period travelers mistook the tombs of the Egyptian pyramids as evidence of “Joseph’s Granaries.”³⁴ So if, in reassembling the storehouse, we find that the boundary between life and death is not so easily recognized, neither is the boundary between one cultural practice and another. Nor is defining its functions – what media concepts were generated, and when – a simple task. It is sometimes difficult to know even the approximate arrangement of these ancient assemblies. What we do know is that, specialized now by use and user, the storehouse of Egypt’s 13th to 18th Dynasty was divided by political control as well as purpose. “Every great department of the State, Government, or city had its own warehouse,” with a “principle of division” that had led to specialized stores pertinent to one group or another. Gathered now so as to be set apart, Manchester finds references to the “white warehouse” – the store of linens, jewels, and wine – and the “gold storehouse,” along with mining depots, quarries, granaries, and armories. Some were large – the real granaries were domed structures as high as two stories – but many weren’t detailed explicitly, and of course not all materials required storage.³⁵

Each storehouse was itself divided, split “into rooms or chambers which were reserved for their own particular kinds of goods.” Separate spots for linens and jewels, chambers for fruit, wine, beer, and bread. But assembly is not just about storage. Techniques of transmission like carrying, pulling, and dragging were critical to the ancient storehouse. Hanging goods on poles had long been a means of moving materials, as had animals (the Egyptians made use of the ass) and carts (pulled on solid wheels). Manchester describes the presence of yokes as early as the Old Kingdom. But the heaviest goods were dragged. While this may not seem a particularly sophisticated means of transmission, drags required complex infrastructures. Smoothed paths were prepared in advance, and the work was facilitated “by pouring oils on the road.” On the “question of containers,” Manchester is more succinct. With limited trees for chests, stone and clay formed vessels for both the storage and transmission of goods. Because Manchester’s account is drawn largely from diagrams – as Latour notes, their own sort of assembly – one of the difficulties in reading inscriptions of these “container technologies,” the bundles, bolts, chests, pots, and jars common to the walls of tombs and other murals, is his uncertainty in knowing if they represented filled vessels or objects in their own right. With a storehouse for jars, or a storehouse for chests, we may find a literal assembly of assemblies.³⁶

Jonathan Sterne has recalled Lewis Mumford’s suggestion that a propensity to emphasize the importance of “tools over containers” – even in media studies – overlooks the latter’s “equally vital role.” Containers, after all, are “useful” without calling much attention to their use.³⁷ But though Sterne frames them as such, containers are not precisely objects. They are object-functions. Making other things into objects, they are responsible for ordering and operationalizing them in preparation for new object-orientations. As Shannon Mattern notes, technologies like stacks and shelves activate acts of arrangement. What may have been “only a few days before,” part of “a miscellany of merchandise” become, here, “individuated objects, appreciated for their distinctive functions or aesthetic values, classified and authorized.”³⁸ To the extent that media are containers, it is in this way that containers, themselves, are a kind of media. When the storehouse is taken as such, it becomes a logistical medium responsible for “imposing organizations on the people and cementing them in a society.”³⁹ Like calendars and clocks, it too defines “a new system of relations between social and technical elements,” one which required new sorts of actors – not only governors, slaves, and laborers, but auditors, accountants, and storekeepers.⁴⁰ And as its storekeepers secured materials for everything from the production of paper to pyramids, the storehouse became the foundation for future media forms. Techniques of accounting were introduced that transformed the storehouse’s contents into records on papyrus and slate, and auditors were employed to review these new forms of second-order storage, verifying that they were, indeed, representations chained to reality.

To argue that assembly is some sort of ur-mediative technique is to place it in an often contradictory genealogy of mediative operation. The means and modes of assembly are varied and various, with different intents and outcomes. Sometimes things are brought together to take them apart, an operation that informs Joseph’s preparation as it does the industrial extraction of contemporary recycling centers. Other times they are gathered to be pressed into more enduring forms, an act that will describe everything from the production of black bodies as vehicles of American capitalist labor to the stamping of shellac into platters suitable for recording their melancholy melodies. In some cases, assembly will stand in recognition of geography, as regional distribution centers carve up continents. In others, it is presented in defiance of them, abstracting digital storage solutions that exist only in the cloud. But what is true of all cultural techniques is true here. What had been a simple demand became a complex one. The storehouse, I have said, is not the modern warehouse, but we already see the skeleton of this later structure. The slippage between storage and transmission had already begun. Logistical media like names, maps, archives, and astrolabes don’t just store identities, geographies, artifacts, and astronomies, they reconstitute them and make them transmittable. That they index and orient is inevitable, because indexing and orienting is the result of any media operation – that is, of any assembly. The storehouse, as a logistical medium, transformed the contents within it, orienting them to new ways of working.⁴¹

Workings of the Warehouse

The interior of the modern warehouse seems to have little resemblance to its ancient ancestor. Though the idea of assembly is as present in Amazon’s fulfillment centers as it is Joseph’s granaries, along with the architectural divisions of space and sorting, forms of administration (with programs rather than papyrus), and even the same personnel (or their robotic replacements), the warehouse is not interested in conservation. It is an endpoint for supply, and our global supply chains are thick with the possibilities of its promises. It offers to prepare, not preserve, materials that will be required elsewhere. As such it proscribes a fundamentally different kind of cultural technique. This practice overloaded the former functions of the storehouse at the beginning of the early modern era, with the appearance of a new kind of assembly known as the factory—and with the lines of the ships that circulated between them.

Warehouses and trading posts have always been a fixture of exchange.⁴² All roads had once led to Rome, and its warehouses had necessarily overflowed with the “supply of the world’s goods.” These were always in “the process of distribution,” as stock or manufactured – assembled – by slaves.⁴³ Later incarnation of these structures appeared as a more particular kind of organizational institution in the “factories” of late medieval Europe. More than mere crossroads, these were sites for the assembly of commodities in preparation for dispersal from one geography to another. Contracts establishing the responsibilities of the agents operating these remote outposts were drafted as early as 1282, but factories themselves appeared in earnest when the Portuguese established one on the coast of Mauritania in 1445. The Portuguese feitoriawas a combination market, warehouse, and way station, overseen by a feitor (factor) trading on behalf of the crown. Duplicated by the press of discovery, the form proliferated as outposts were ripped from landscapes to forge chains of supply between European companies and local populations, a mechanism for governing vast networks of trade with a minimum of human and nonhuman resources. While they were not intended as permanent structures, they increasingly became so. Co-opted by a second wave of expansion from the Dutch, French, and English, minor factories turned into major ones, sprawling colonial empires that pulled European interests to their shores.⁴⁴

In his writing on the methods of maritime expansion, John Law suggests that the form of the feitoria spread primarily through the introduction of new techniques of navigation, mechanisms of movement that were “assembled,” as he puts it, “by the Portuguese system-builders.” From meditative manuals like the Regimento do Astrolabio et do Quadrante, the Portuguese were able to “operate at a distance,” Law explains, by gathering three distinct sorts of “emissaries”—documents, devices, and “drilled people.” Media forms like astronomical charts and the tables of solar declination, along with new technologies like astrolabes and quadrants, were encased within the envelope of a new site of storage – a vessel both “mobile [and] durable.” Along with the introduction of the carrack and its expansive cargo hold, this meant that the ship, itself, had become a sort of mobile warehouse. And as astronomers like Brahe soon saw, within these waterlogged walls were carried a multitude of other assemblies – arranging new points of orientation by compiling “thousands and thousands of calculations [and] correspondence.”⁴⁵

Not only does this suggest the ship as a technology of assembly, it places it in a line of technical development that affords objects like the containership their own grand Biblical origin – in Noah’s Ark, which shares in Latin, though not in Hebrew, an etymology tying it to another famous container – the one now in care, we’re assured, of the government’s “top men.” But in the early modern era at least, there was little sacred in this sort of assembly. As suited to transporting the wealth of distant lands as it was human bodies bound in servitude, we find here the moment to which Fred Moten and Stefano Harney trace the birth of modern logistics. It stands to reason we will find logistical media here. And indeed, while techniques of navigation were sufficient for managing the movement of ships, they were not enough to prepare the materials within them. As Simone Browne notes, as a means for “accounting for a particular ship’s cargo,” tools like the branding iron became a logistical media technology. They too served to “mark out a point.” But this mark, she suggests, is one that will track the black body, orient observers to its diminished subjectivity, and limit its movement in space and time. As the means for constituting “a new category of subject,” it altered the distinction between subject and object, a “massifying” practice that had the effect of transforming humans into commodities.⁴⁶

The architecture designed to assemble these newly ordered objects was precise, intended for contents “stowed on shelves” with, for example, “a height of 2 feet 7 inches between the beams.” As the operation of slavery was thus “reduced to geometric units,” the ship’s hold became a grid where a new kind of “stowing process” could be drawn. It inscribed a new form of rationalized assembly, ordered, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote, in “perfect barbarism.”⁴⁷ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney find in this a parallel to Law’s “drilled people” – the formation of what they describe as logisticality. As Frank Wilderson writes, “something happened to us in the hold,” and Harney characterizes this as “a social capacity found most intensely amongst those who found themselves, who found each other, under the duress of almost total access but in the grip of each other.”⁴⁸

The grid was not unique to the slave ship, though it found a dreadful articulation there. Nor was it confined to logistics’ human subjects. Bernhard Siegert describes how Le Corbusier’s cellular architectures would, hundreds of years later, propose extending this logic to the entirety of existence, compressing it down to “human scale” – not 2 feet 7 inches, but a comparatively spacious 15 square meters. These “new forms of standardization” were addressed to humans and nonhumans alike, reconfiguring the “dwelling, the office, the workshop, the factory” in the extruded structures of the skyscraper. So too would the geodesic matrix of latitudes and longitudes charted here – as techniques of address and ordering – make possible the production of equally encompassing logistical technologies like global positioning systems. That these same techniques had been responsible for the “checkerboard topographies” of colonial settlements was only a minor legacy of rasterization. That the “floorplan” was a name for organizing the sections of the slave ship as well as the designs of the integrated circuit, mere coincidence.⁴⁹

What had begun in the slave ship carried over to the work of the warehouse. And in the development of a geometry premised on the security of its supply, we find the operative medium that would forge the links of the global supply chain. It was the grid itself which promised a future of rationalized assembly, affecting an efficiency of precision and scale as it extended the object-functions of the ancient sites of storage. The grid, as Siegert writes, is the “medium that operationalizes deixis.” In extending the operations of assembly, it encoded its own logistical technique, one that allowed the warehouse to more precisely link “dietic procedures with chains of symbolic operations that have effects in the real.”⁵⁰ The result was a symbolic supply of objects. If logistics is capitals’ “art of war,” then the grid, here, became the “the geometry of empire.”⁵¹ Chaining demand to its manifestation in the ordered rows of the warehouse, it inscribed an empty space in want of an object.

As Braudel recalls, “the warehouse, an improved instrument of exchange, had existed of necessity for a long time under different forms, sometimes modest or hybrid, because it answered needs that had always been there.” It was “necessary because of the length of the production and trade cycle, because of the slow pace of travel and communications, the risks of distant markets, the irregularities of production and the treachery of the seasons.”⁵² One result of the widespread adoption of the factory system and the increasing rationalization of the warehouse was to provide a constancy of supply that smoothed the otherwise staggered flow of seasonal trade—preparing merchandise without depending on the immediate availability of local merchants. But the lines of the early modern warehouse also created endpoints for new operations of transmission. Just as techniques like accounting had abstracted storage in media like lists and ledgers, letters from ship captains gave way to documents like bills of lading that permitted the transmission of materials by paper.⁵³ When a consignment of iron was “sold while afloat” in the latter half of the 16th century, it demonstrated the power of these new technologies of separation. Long before modern telecommunication, transactions could be completed, endorsed, and assigned while a shipment was at sea, waiting on the docks, or within the walls of a warehouse. Just as the ruled space of the warehouse had produced a space in need of supply, the supply that would occupy those spaces could be tied to the mediative mechanism of an order blank – filled out by the shipper, his agents, or their assigns.⁵⁴

Through the work of the warehouse, the old constraints of time and space that had governed ancient assemblies gave way to regular reserves of a newly operationalizable ontological object. It was the consequence of an age, as Heidegger wrote, where “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” This ordering had, he suggested, its own standing. “We call it the standing-reserve.” In setting nature to “exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance,” the world was ordered to report as “storehouse.” He should have taken this literally. After all, the objects these new sites contained expressed “something more, and something more essential, than mere ‘stock.’” Assembled as supply, they became a way of ordering for the very possibility of future action.⁵⁵

Many of the materials critical to the supply chains of modern media trace their lineage to this moment, where the world was first assembled as the storehouse of the standing reserve. Before the mass of media on the assembly line, before the floors of factories were prepared for the march of the industrial revolution, vast geographies of varied materials were discovered, gathered, and readied. Dutch and British factories in Indonesia organized the tin crucial to the circuits that would define telecommunication and computation.⁵⁶ Europeans plundered Africa and the New World first for gold, then for ivory and rubber. Along the way they found metals like copper, antimony, cobalt, and tungsten. But the critical realization is that these had to be changed culturally before they could be changed materially. The merchandise of merchant associations of the sixteenth century had indeed remained “mere stock.” The companies that followed had produced something different. Carried on Adam Smith’s “long land and sea carriages,” vast lines of supply now reached everywhere.⁵⁷ While trade had the mundane effect of unconcealing the lands and resources it encountered, it was this new operation of assembly which had the transcendental effect of revealing the space of future possibility.

Operations on Objects

Not all media operate in the same way. As Harold Innis wrote, some forms of media, like stone or marble, are “heavy and durable.” The ancient sites of storage carved out geographies, creating points of orientation by providing infrastructures that persisted. Other media, like papyrus, are by contrast, “light and easily transported.”⁵⁸ The records of the granaries were a kind of “immutable and combinable mobile,” Bruno Latour might say, because they permitted the movement of their massive assemblies across geographic constraints, allowing others to order their contents.⁵⁹ As this latter sort of media developed they had the effect of making logistical infrastructures “soft,” accessible to new forms of operation and control. There are a whole host of media that accomplished this: maps, lists, order, and plans; bills of lading, assembly, and exchange; parts lists and production orders; requisition and receipts. Ned Rossiter puts forward the logistical software systems created by companies like SAP as the most contemporary constitution of this control, where lists of suppliers and supply come together in a database designed for the precise particularities of procurement.⁶⁰

The techniques these forms instantiate are only possible, however, when assembly itself has become virtual – inscribed in such a way to be combinable, superimposable, and translatable beyond its material inhabitance.⁶¹ It is no longer concerned with the sorting of stuff, in other words, but with operations on objects. And while the collection and collation of lists is a practice that Liam Cole Young traces to the earliest days of writing, the catalogue, I would suggest, represented a more expansive medium for this sort of assembly, one accessible to a wider range of uses and users.⁶² In her history of the “technical arts,” Pamela Long details the “manuscript treatises on weaponry and other kinds of machines and devices” that “proliferated in the fifteenth-century German empire.” Her most striking examples are the lavish Zeugbücher created for the emperor Maximilian, a set of “spectacular inventory books” coinciding with his reorganization of the imperial army. They compiled the contents of the armory’s stores, collecting them in itemized lists detailed with hand-painted illustrations of the cannons, field guns, and armaments scattered throughout the empire. Whatever their practical use as an inventory, Long argues that they had an additional value in assembling the military power and the cultural authority of the prince.⁶³

Long translates Zeugbücher as “ordnance books,” which is accurate enough given the purpose they were put to. More literally, they might translate simply as “stuff books.” To suggest that they are catalogues is to contend with the ways in which they are not nearly the same sort of thing as the commercial form later offered up by the retail empires of firms like Sears and Roebuck. The ordnance is much more an index for artifacts than it is a collection of commodities. In line with other early collections which listed manuscripts, works of art, and similarly individual objects, each arm gathered in this virtual armory has its own circumstances, being, and history. But the name is evocative. While zeug can be translated as “stuff,” it has also – notably by Heidegger – been used to connote a purposeful thing. In Heidegger’s description, this “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit) is different from merely being present-at-hand (Vorhandensein). A hammer may be a mere thing (ding), present (but not encountered) as the raw substance of its materiality. Zeug, however, recalls the hammer in hand – the object, not the thing.⁶⁴ The Zeugbücher, then, makes claim to a book of objects, readied, the Emperor hoped, for operation.

These operations seem to have coalesced into a particular kind of commercial form by the end of the nineteenth century, built up from refinements of logistical technologies like lists, addresses, and (eventually) phone numbers, with hand-drawn illustrations soon to be exchanged for halftone prints. In the United States, mail-order companies proliferated, and all manner of catalogues and order blanks found their way into the ready hands of a consumptive country.⁶⁵ These freshly printed zeugbücher purported to be books of tools, but even as their contents were considered by their use-value, they were now presented for exchange. And they were not things, exactly, but the formof them. Present-at-hand only by promising that they now stand at-the-ready, the standing reserve had moved out of the warehouse and onto the printed page.

In operationalizing the warehouse’s reserves, the catalogue allowed users to operate with the warehouse, rather than within it. For the world to become knowable, Latour explains, it must be assembled in a new way. The catalogue anchored the material world to a new source of knowledge, offering only the end of the chain of translation that, it claimed, could be followed back to its source. But indeed, it will do more than merely resemble the original situation, it will replace it. So much so that the objects in the catalogue need not yet be real. The diectic circulation of the reference is all that is required for the catalogue’s authors to be able to “bring back” these objects – to affect, other words, their assembly in the real world. It is they alone who can see the “chain of evidence” to be operationalized on the other end of this virtual assembly.⁶⁶

This transformation was evident even in the earliest days of the modern catalogue. Alain Pottage and Brad Sherman have argued that early industrial productions “were never technically or materially identical.” While the “ideology” of modern manufacture – with its reliance on measures, machines, and predefined parts – may have predisposed consumers to recognize what they saw as a replica of some unknown and unseen “original,” the aura of that original passed to the copy, they suggest, primarily “by means of pictures.” The ideology of modern media was in this mimetic movement. After all, it was in the pages of catalogues, more than in the factory, where these goods were now assembled. As the first genre which presupposed that products could be repeated exactly, an object’s appearance in a catalogue – its assembly there – was itself enough to signify a construction through the means of modern manufacture. “In its very form,” they suggest, “a mechanically-reproduced drawing expressed the principle that qualified mechanical manufactures as replicas: ‘machine-drawn, steel-engraved lines expunged all traces of handwork and celebrated mechanical processes.’” This was not without consequence. Commercial figures have long served as a means of “(mis)representing the provenance” of products, as well as the conditions under which they were produced.⁶⁷ Standing in for particular chains of production, the catalogue image served to mask the particularities of those chains. It was a fiction, but a necessary one – needed for complex constructions being formed from increasingly expansive and disjoint geographies. One of the mediative functions of media is, after all, to assemble. But what was brought together in theserepresentations often bore little resemblance to their reality.

Supply Chaîne Opératoire

It should be no surprise that I have in mind the supply chain as a medium like the catalogue. No longer confined even to the comparatively light pages of papyrus or print, it is a metaphorical rather than material medium. Though the term (and the related idea of the “commodity chain”) had already been in use before the Second World War, it received its most durable form in 1982, when the business consultant Keith Oliver proposed, in a meeting with the Dutch consumer electronics manufacturer Philips, the idea of managing the previously separate systems of production, marketing, distribution, sales, and finance “as though” they were a single entity. Indeed, Oliver argued that firms should now manage their “total supply chain,” to assemble, in other words, all their previously disparate assemblies.⁶⁸

The assembly of stuff in the storehouse may have been limited to the movement of materials, but the products pictured in the catalogue suggest something more of the logistical thought crucial to Oliver’s imagination of the supply chain. In this “logistics of perception,” to steal a phrase, things are assembled not in body, but in mind. In coining this term, Paul Virilio had set out to argue that the difference between cinema and photography was in mobility and distribution, that in cinema “the viewpoint can be mobile, can get away from the static focus and share the speed of moving objects.” The camera, he explained, served to reproduce (and replace) the function of the human eye, while features like the artificiality of cinematic lighting coincided with the production of space through an illusion of “distance, depth, and three-dimensionality.” But it is in the assembly of the images themselves – the assembly line of photographs – where the mediative meaning of cinema becomes most resonant. It is here that images are rendered “fragments,” assembled in “non-sensory order,” and joined together in cinematic montage broken from the “spatio-temporal continuity” of physical space. Modern assembly, itself, is predicated on precisely this “instability of dimensions,” the repetition and distribution of images “exiled” from their natural place. In 1848 John Stuart Mill had written that “to produce is to move.” Virilio’s argument updates this to suggest that, after 1914, mediated images became powerful because, now, “to move was to produce.”⁶⁹ After 1982, I argue, the supply chain became significant not because it organized the movement of materials, but because it offered a mode of production premised on the mimetic movement of the images, interfaces, and data structures that defined them.

It may seem – in the grand scale set by this newly operative epistemology – that the clear order once present in the storehouse has become markedly less apparent. After all, as Shannon Mattern writes, sites like Amazon’s fulfillment centers now operate in accordance with a new law of logistics, one that means books, “originally Amazon’s bread and butter, might be shelved next to, well, bread.” But while media forms like books may seem ever more dematerialized and disassembled, the reality is that they are assembling still, just in more opaque and inscrutable configurations. They still rest on metal shelves, Mattern writes, but “on server racks” in “data centers.”⁷⁰ As the designs of the digital extend the representational assembly of the catalogue, or of cinema, in new and often disturbing directions, it is reasonable to wonder what further changes have been brought to the work of assembly.

The chaîne opératoire draws us to the differences in these techniques that make a difference, both in the new operations they enable and the new technologies that are required to render them durable. Ancient assemblies like the Library of Alexandria may have radiated enormous power to their associated civilizations, but once disassembled this power would dissipate and dissolve. Indeed, media archaeology is perhaps uniquely attuned to the impossibility of reassembly – what comes back is, after all, rarely the same. The shuttering of supply chains for the manufacture of vintage video games, or the chemical components of Polaroid film, speaks to logistical legacies that are difficult to reconstruct. But digital designs, even assembled only once, may replicate with promiscuous abandon. Less stable, but more supple, they propagate the forms of their assembly with sometimes calamitous effect. Techniques of bodily inscription have given way to techniques that inscribe with bodies, with dynamic displays of economic offers, racialized regimes of facial recognition, and even the algorithmic assembly of movie posters – distorted both in space and time. While analog assembly had been marked, literally, by the material change wrought by reproduction, the versioning capabilities of digital assemblies remain resistant to these imperfections. Promising their stewards malleable and memorious recollections, they suggest, in effect, a storehouse of all that’s ever been stored.

This is not the end of the chaîne opératoire. We end with cables and connections yet unlaid, digital databases yet to be designed – with pivotal techniques and technologies like assembly lines and cargo containers still in the making. But even in the earliest lists of products and prices, in inventories and catalogues, the techniques of assembly were already, it seems, coming together. The new supply house, the Sears catalogue had announced, was present. The globe was now drawn by the grid, and between its lines were the empty spaces that have carved out demands for supply overflowing from warehouses the world over. The supply chain defines the technical sequence of transformations that bring raw materials together in their momentary manifestation as a final assembly. But in following this chain, we may yet see that the techniques of this operation were once, themselves, raw. If media archaeology is the study of the disassembled, the supply chain, not as mere material movement, not as technology, but as technique of imagining the world, must be opened up. After all, it is only when it is “cracked open,” that we may find, as Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have urged, “an insight into the freight of bodily suffering that the seamlessness of circulation renders invisible.”⁷¹

Notes