Book Reviews

Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media. Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 248p. Paper, $26.95 (ISBN: 978-1478010760).

“Logistical media” isn’t a common term in the world of libraries and archives; a cursory search for it in the database LISTA returns zero results. Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media persuaded me within about three pages, however, that it should be. In the book’s coinage, logistical media are media of “orientation”: clocks, inventories, spreadsheets, communications satellites, even postage stamps (3). Tools that enable the creation, arrangement, and distribution of goods and services, “[l]ogistical media are processual; they orient, locate, and organize words, things, people, and data” (96). Examples in information professions abound: linked data, thesauri, RFID tags, and integrated library systems, but also book trucks, couriers, shelving, and signage.

This edited volume’s essays explore media as a global commodity whose production and dissemination rely on extensive physical and digital logistics—and global logistics as a system that depends equally upon media for execution. If commodification is the what of capitalism and surplus value the why, logistics is the how: the “organization and coordination of resources to manufacture and distribute” product around the world (1). Logistical media, then, are commodities whose end product is optimization and efficiency. The book’s overarching argument is that media and logistics are best understood as co-constitutive. Telegraph wires, to cite one example, required the cross-country distribution of timber for poles. Because that distribution proved logistically feasible, the telegraph achieved prominence as a media form (15). At what cost and for what ends are questions at the core of many contributors’ arguments.

Assembly Codes and its editors, Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starioleski, and Susan Zieger, are situated within media studies. However, the volume’s topically diverse but thematically cohesive contents are broadly accessible and relevant to library, archives, and information workers. Essays range from philosophical to nuts-and-bolts and span analyses rooted in performance studies, media theory, African Studies, and more. A common anchor throughout is anthropologist Anna Tsing’s notion of “supply chain capitalism,” which consists of “commodity chains based on subcontracting, outsourcing, and allied arrangements” that emphasize corporate autonomy and perpetual optimization.1

The book’s three sections respectively conceptualize media as 1) a site of logistical imagination, “new ways of seeing and listening, reading and knowing, thinking and moving” that logistical technologies produce, 2) logistical instruments, and 3) accelerators and optimizers of global supply chains (3). Some chapters explore histories of a specific media form; others outline the importance of theory in providing terminology to critique these systems. Still others document resistance, such as Ebony Coletu’s account of Pan-African logistics. All make compelling points about the workings of capitalism, logistics, media, and inequity and how their interrelations shape human and nonhuman existence.

In part I, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten theorize logistics as both outcome and agent of a Western scarcity mindset. Bridging the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary surveillance capitalism of social media, they situate their critique of Enlightenment-era paradigms through the concept of property. The naming of an item (or person) as property enacts its loss as a shareable resource, and, within this mindset, loss prevention becomes a global driving impulse. Loss prevention, it seems safe to say, frequently drives policy decisions around access in libraries and archives and provides an illuminating lens through which to negotiate a balance between resource preservation and gatekeeping.

This anticolonial critique weaves throughout each section. Liam Cole Young elucidates the colonialist ends of many logistical media forms through an analysis of cod fisheries and settlement around the North Atlantic. Nets, barrels, salt, maps, and compasses made the mass transit of fish possible; new ships of the 1500s “[made] land and sea interoperable” (98). Young locates these entrepreneurial developments alongside the emergence of documentation culture as Europeans pushed across the Americas, spurring the growth of a juridical system based on written charters and treaties that overrode First Nations media such as wampum belts. Young’s focus on documentality recalls Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun’s articulation of worship of the written word as one of the characteristics of white supremacy,2 and it resonates amid the disproportionate whiteness of writing-centric fields such as higher education, libraries, and scholarly publishing.

Within a contemporary context, Kay Dickinson highlights the influence of private sector interests on higher education; college is increasingly engineered to “inure the current and would-be worker to the rationalities of the supply chain, including its inevitable and systemic future of insecurity and debt” (173). Academic standards, Dickinson suggests, are largely determined by private industries, which then profit from unpaid internships and fieldwork “opportunities” mediated through curricula. Moreover, academia itself relies on the inexpensive, specialized labor of graduate students and adjunct instructors even as it churns out more graduates than fields can sustain; we see this phenomenon in the casualization of both archival work and librarianship.

Assembly Codes makes a clear case for the incorporation of critical logistics studies into the equity work that many in libraries are already doing. Logistics is at core a set of techniques for removing barriers, such as digging out canals to expedite shipping or clearing forests to build cell phone towers. Its environmental and human costs have pushed us into climate catastrophe and growing inequity. What kind of efficiencies, the book implicitly calls us to ask, have emerged in libraries—and at whose expense? Subject headings increase discoverability, but taxonomies are inherently reductive. As we eliminate barriers and increase access to resources, what labor demands are we normalizing? What is ICE doing with all that data from LexisNexis and Westlaw? To what extent are libraries themselves logistical media, optimizing the dissemination of information products at huge profits to vendors?

All-encompassing as these dilemmas seem, Assembly Codes finds hope for change through its analyses and through analysis as a practice. As Dickinson puts it, engaging the interworkings of logistics, media, and capitalism equips us to “press for a greater awareness of how instead to strike meaningful allegiances with others under the thumb of globally mobile commerce, rather than greasing its wheels through more elite cross-border affinities” (180).—Lynne Stahl, West Virginia University

Notes

1. Anna Tsing, “Supply Chains and the Human Condition,” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2 (April 2009): 148, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935690902743088.

2. Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, Change Work, 2001).