Ep 13: Supply Chain Criticism

Every commodity imagines a supply chain, and every struggle for justice and equality implicates the logistical spaces that quietly reproduce our historical conjuncture. How do we realign our critical vocabularies, attachments and projects to the supply chains that shape the ongoing reproduction of uneven accumulation and dispossession? And what methods can we share to sharpen the emergence of logistical solidarities to come? These are the questions being asked by the research group Supply Chain Criticism. Today I'm joined by three of its members. Jeff Diamante teaches Philosophy and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and is Professor of Global History of Sustainable Development at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. For over a decade he has researched and written on logistical cartographies, energy infrastructure and political ecology. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum, Locating Terminal Landscapes, tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. He is now building a long-term research network on supply chain criticism to document and evaluate the conflicts implied by the EU's Critical Raw Materials Framework. Alex Campbell is a lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Environmental Cultures at the University of Glasgow. Her research interrogates the nexus of interlocking forms of social and environmental resistance that occur within and against logistical infrastructure. Her current monograph, Counter-Logistical Forms, Infrastructural Resistance, Refusal and Repair in Literature and Culture since 1960, interrogates the lived terrains and emergent grammars of struggle as they materialise in and against logistical infrastructure. She is currently the co-editor of the ASLE, UKI Journal, Green Letters and founding member of the University of Glasgow's Infrastructure Humanities Group. Florence Evans is a researcher and writer working on cultural memory, state violence and extraction. She completed her PhD in cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam in 2026 where her thesis developed the concept of fugitive memory to read what state violence is built to make unreadable. Focusing on a generation of artists born after Argentina's last dictatorship. With Jeff, she co-convened the Raw Earth Agriculture Workshop on overlooked inputs into the supply chains feeding Western Europe. Her writing has appeared in Open Democracy and Art in the Public Sphere. Okay, great. Thank you for joining me. To start off, could I ask you to explain to listeners what supply chain criticism is? And then perhaps talk a bit about its emergence within the humanities at this moment. How would you contextualise this? Why do you think it's a necessary development? Okay, what is supply chain criticism? We see it as something of a critical gesture. One that is responding to, I would say, two key issues. The first is that we're thinking of it as something like a rejoinder or a response to a crisis. And the second is that we're thinking of it as a response to a crisis. And the third is that we're thinking of it as a response to a crisis. And the fourth is that we're thinking of it as something like a rejoinder. And the fifth is that we're thinking of it as something like a rejoinder. And the sixth is that we're thinking of it as something like a rejoinder. A complementary framework to the critical paradigm of situated knowledges, which has become something of a dominant schema in the humanities at large, and particularly in environmental humanities, where this offers a sort of like a really influential concept, right, that has asserted the need to reground the interpretive subject's orientation to the field by foregrounding the sort of individuated history of that subject as constitutive of their analytical interpretation and production of knowledge of that particular field. Okay. So, this is a kind of a, I don't know, a schema, a paradigm that has, we think, produced a critical tendency towards what might be considered like a more myopic frame, one that loses sight of the more abstract forces of, say, something like large-scale industrial systems, financial networks, or juridical structures that are not necessarily immediately sensible through the framing of an individual body and its grounded modes of critique. Right, it's very difficult to have a sense of those kind of modes of critique. from the individuated position. But these determining forces are there, right? They absolutely apply pressure and exert force over the constitution of a particular field. So, how do we bring them into sensibility? So, supply-share criticism, we're suggesting, offers a complementary framework then to this kind of embedded scale of analysis, because it provides us a way of addressing these more abstract forces that are sensitive to the kind of the material inscription of large-scale systems upon both body and ground. So, in a sense, supply-share criticism is really building on the critical inheritances of things like world system studies, or it's invested in the same sort of dynamics of core and periphery analytics and even development, you know, active network theory stuff as well, and the propositional politics of something like cognitive mapping. But it does so in a way that really doesn't linger in the abstract, right? It's not just about revealing the world to be constitutive of and determined by a complex network of competing forces and abstract structures, but instead it's sort of, like, allows us to apply the forensic granularity of situated knowledges in order to analyze and access these otherwise, like, totalizing structures of logistical capital. So, where we've seen a kind of, the scalar differences between world systems and situated knowledges, they tend to be placed in a sort of, like, oppositional force to one another. A sort of, like, I don't know, humanities inviting. We're suggesting that supply-chain criticism gives us a means of sort of shuttling between these different gradations of critique, right, going from that more individual to the kind of totalizing. And as such, we're seeing supply-chain criticism as a mode of analysis that is way more adequate to comprehending our current conjecture, in which we find all manner of, like, imperial and neo-imperial forces that are serving themselves violently through the control of not only massively uneven source geographies, but in the kind of securing and reproduction of logistical terrains, right, so we can think here of things like the the blockade of Gaza, through which the Israeli state secures its genocidal regime, the war of Ukraine, and the kind of global impact of wheat and fuel supplies, or the current standoff between the USA and Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz, and the impacts of which haven't only really reverberated across the global market, but have left more than, like, 8,000 seafarers stranded in unstable waters. And we can see this kind of, like, the resurgence of the USA's sort of, like, imperialist arm, and its attempt to sort of secure these, you know, you know, these sort of, you know, sort of, future geographies of sourcing and supply as something that is very specific to the form of the world as it is just now, right? So, situated knowledge isn't really particularly good at seeing or analyzing these kind of vast structures of imperial power. Supply chain criticism is, so that's the first. Secondly, I think, or we think it offers something, like, a bit more robust and radically, maybe, operative mode of critique, in that its attentiveness to the material interconnections between dislocated geographies of extraction, production, storage, and distribution, right, it presents to us a way of mapping an emergent revolutionary sociality that really only comes into view through the framing of the supply chain itself, right? And this is where the terminology of the chain is really important. A chain implies interconnection, conjunction, and relationality as central to its organizational force, right? That's what a chain is. It links things together. But, so, reading with or through the chain immediately presents us with a different mode or means of interpreting the field as that which is recursive to the kind of the convergence of different social and material forces that accrue along the different lengths of the chain. Which is to say, like, rather than locating critique within the bounds of a single source geography or focusing on a singular site of production, like a particular, like a single factory or a single terrain, supply chain criticism is interested in what happens between and across these kind of constitutive links, right? It's necessary, attentive to the different component parts that constitutes the chain as a whole. It's not interested in either the beginning or the end, it's always about the in-between and the movements and mobilities across those kind of, like, links. And in that, it becomes newly attentive to the kind of the mobilization of what we might think of as, like, an apparatus of legitimization, one that extends through economic policy development, infrastructural investment, and juridical legislation that secures and determines the existence of a particular chain. And this is really important because in this sense, then, supply chain criticism isn't just a matter of performing a retrograde analysis that seeks to sort of somehow de-fetishize a singular commodity by tracking its, like, constitutive elemental components, nor is it a mode of critique that gets stuck in the sort of terminal sites of capitalist circulation and its various violences, right? It's not just about identifying, say, the root cause of an oil spill or toxification of a specific community, nor is it simply the matter of mapping the planetary movement of a particular material across its different locations, right? It's more than that. It's about being resolutely concrete and specific in our attention to the totalizing structure of logistical capital. And it's about making the links and solidarities between these different sites and subjects of extraction, of production, storage, and distribution legible so that these contested territories and communities become newly sensible to one another, right? It's a capacity-building framework. And this is the crux for us, right? Supply chain criticism is not only agnostic in its force, right? It doesn't just reveal the abstract structures of capitalist circulation that determine the force and feeling of a particular field um but it's propositional right and that it provides a basis of what i've uh just described as like a form of operative knowledge um one that is in its kind of conjunctive grammar allows us to connect otherwise dislocated grounds of labor base or social reproach of struggle through really really concrete and actionable campaigns that extend through and across like labor organizing and warehouses or port blockades all the way through to environmental environmental justice movements and campaigns or anti-colonial and abolition movements right that's what seeing or reading with the chain provides us amazing thank you that was great you've also kind of answered my next question about what is lacking in adjacent critical modes um environmental humanities in particular but also critical theory more broadly yeah maybe you can speak a bit more on that though i think that's there's a shared sense actually amongst um , let's say critical theorists in the humanities over the past let's say 10 years or so that the rapidly shifting tectonics of like the global present um index as it is the things like the rise of a certain kind of you know populist fascism um the violent appropriation of power in various kinds of states that already had a deep history of of neo-colonial um spheres of influence and the disaggregation of power in various kinds of states that already had a deep history of of discrimination of what previously had felt very much like a kind of long um you know neoliberal present i think it's been clear to a lot of people for a long time that actually the typical kinds of habits of critique that we bring to our uh scenes of analysis but also the kinds of objects that bear the weight of our political attachments are insufficient um and i think one of the reasons that they had proven insufficient is because there's been a deep fetishization of a certain kind of um refusal um and i think that's been the reason that they've been proven insufficient is in critical theory to first of all like linger in the empirical there's like this kind of feel-good refusal to acknowledge that there in fact are kind of like concrete empirical spaces of determination that shape you know the kinds of inequalities and forms of dispossession and and violent appropriation all over the world uh that these are not metaphysical and they're certainly not ideational or at least not exclusively they're also concrete they happen in real places and they're the consequences of real decisions and they're the consequences of decisions not just ideologies but also kind of compulsions and the refusal to acknowledge those because whatever like to think with the empirical somehow you know uh resembles some kind of um uh has like this hangover around like colonial forms of metaphysical imposition or god's a view uh approaches to contemporary contradiction i think is is well grounded but it's also insufficient like that refusal is not a good thing it's not a good thing it's not a good thing it's not a good thing and so it's really out of a kind of frustration um that you know the critical toolkit that we inherit is is uh it constantly points us to these kinds of spaces and processes of determination that is to say where things are made how they're made under what conditions through what kinds of labor processes and what kinds of uh forms of inequality are things that things made and unmade and yet that move then to say like well what would it mean to build solidarities and what would it mean to generate forms of co-created knowledge that are meaningfully uh useful in a really pragmatic sense to the kinds of communities that are drawn into these spaces and processes of just you know appropriation and exploitation the refusal to do that because it somehow it somehow is you know it breaks the cardinal sin of the sort of fetishistic indeterminacy of the humanities or a refusal to do that because it somehow it somehow is you know it is a refusal to actually engage in questions of you know propositional redistribution of values or um of privileges of identities um is is at this point i think uh like a problem a real problem in the humanities actually and so there is a there is a kind of meta-theoretical conversation that happens in discussions around supply chains where like you know the the the almost uncomfortable tangibility of these things as objects is also bearing the weight of the much larger conversation about what does it mean to have like what is critique doing what is it what is it inheriting and what is it proposing in the present um that i think is actually quite exciting to us and so if you were yeah i think we could say more about that but that's sort of one of the things that is lurking in the background as it pertains to the humanities specifically um i would just very briefly say as well though that it's a very organic um bridging let's say of certain traditions within let's say environmental media studies which is for a very long time had a quite sustained attention to the technicity of media systems and forms of representation on the one hand and then on the other hand within this larger kind of rubric of the infrastructural turn and attention to um forms of determination that are not present to the expressivity of an event or of an object um and you know there's a long reading list for both that are not actually necessarily in conversation and i think that supply chain criticism is a way of bridging those conversations wow i said we weren't going to jump over each other but actually we definitely do that um yeah no i was just thinking you were speaking supply chain criticism is is kind of a shared gesture and i think that we're coming at it from very different angles i think um to me supply chain criticism is this kind of focus on conjunctures so that the moment of a protest or a warehouse strike or a moment of violence or sort of a profound image will appear so i look at argentina um and the current image of millet's chainsaw is this huge kind of conjunctural moment so the ways that i read supply chains maybe isn't as focused on the dimensions as on what these moments um uh mean when they're put into relation with each other how they occur um and i think that uh supply chain criticism specifically allows us to read things in a way that is more focused on the terrain rather than um events as kind of isolated from one another uh which i think is a really interesting and important intervention into cultural analysis right and this question of reading seems quite important um i wonder if you could speak a bit more about that and um yeah perhaps what is at stake narratively i think it's it's also to do with the kind of how can we salvage counter-narrative from from discourses and narrative that have just taken us down these like these avenues where it becomes this kind of how do we add more stories how do we i mean narratology is a kind of colonial project and i'm definitely not the first person to point that out but it's like how can we have more and more and more stories and how can i the the the author of this story expose enough stuff and be and impress you with all these things that i've uncovered and it's just just not in the tradition of you know kind of stewart hall and and going back into like what what was counter-narrative supposed to to kind of elucidate for folks so i think there's also that uh sort of sense of return i don't think that we're necessarily introducing new things to the humanities but maybe we're going to be introducing new things to the world but maybe we are uh also looking back a lot of what we're talking about makes me think like what is it that we are sort of circling here what is the the thing that we are trying to access and it isn't uh clean stories and narratives but it is this kind of suppression of of time and beings and um territories you know and supply chains and the ways that i've been looking at supply chains um in the research that i do in relation to state violence is supply chains as a way of as machines of erasure um that produce an image a proposition and in so doing conceal so much and in the process of my looking at that concealed aspect i'm not trying to expose it as this like very uh cleanly defined perfect thing that's been unearthed on the ground but it's it's like um more like pointing to what the supply chain does which is to conceal and to erase um but yeah i mean it's it's really a very i think it's a really exciting question like what is it that is going to be revealed in the process of us looking at supply chains together um and it's so it's even in me saying this it's so hard for us to it's so hard to get away from the language of concealing and revealing and i feel like that probably like one of my first fucking modules in art history was concealing and revealing and it's like how do we conceal and reveal and it's like how do we conceal and reveal and it's like how do we what what is the new language that we need here but um yeah like how do you find ways of speaking to all of this labor and territory and time that is being erased by the supply chain um with what relationality with what tools with what uh co-conspirators you know can i just say something like to build on that because i think what i've learned so so much in our kind of conversations and collaborations specifically on your project flow and the way that you think about um fugitivity and fugitive memory is is that you know it's one thing to say okay here's a thing in the world it's a commodity and it is determined by certain kinds of logics of calculation um of assembly of valuation and you know to disentangle all of those determinations from the tangibility of the objects you do need a supply chain analysis right you need to like think about like where are the particulate where are the minerals from on the planet under what conditions are they extracted under what conditions are they made concealable as the commodity which is essentially what a commodity is is a technology for violent and excessive concealment um otherwise known as the commodity fetish right and the among other things what is fetishized were concealed in the commodity is precisely the social relations that determine the shape and value of that object for which you actually actually you do need a little bit of marxist political economy at least a little bit maybe not a lot maybe a little bit but but there's another right and so so there's a way in which like this quite this sort of the dynamic of visibility invisibility or concealment unconcealment it really takes us back to some of the formative um uh propositions of critical theory itself in the shift from hegel to marx which is that we are surrounded by a world of determination things do not appear as they actually are but in the way that they actually appear is also a set of determinations that we have to have a concrete account of in order to get to these kinds of erasures that you're talking about and only through those erasures will we have something like a revolutionary politics and if we're not talking about that what the fuck are we talking about but the thing that i keep learning from your workflow is that this question of fugitivity is not adjacent to that secondary question of what is a face and then turned into the fetish right it's also about where propositions go to thrive do you want to tell us like a little bit about that more about how you've thought about fugitivity i'm thinking about one of the answers in your phd defense which just sort of yeah just like really changed how i thought about fugitivity i think what's what's been a really big tell for me just in my journey with the question of supply chain criticism and how i found it was that i was doing field work on state violence and dictatorial uh violence in argentina and kept finding myself in conversations about the salt flats uh in northern argentina um and what the industry calls the lithium triangle which covers um northern argentina and and is being absolutely ransacked by uh the malay government and his you know fast-tracked projects um i think half of the lithium uh belongs to private chinese mining companies now but um it it's in in the arrival of those um of those questions and subjects through my search for information um about dictatorial memory it was just this kind of natural um coalescence of these two forms of violence that were taking place and there was absolutely no question that there was a continuous quality to that uh to that violence um in terms of the fugitivity um that i look at and i i uh work very closely with sadea hartman and fred motens um to explore the question of uh fugitivity and its dialectical relationship to state violence um and that's not just to do with the um you know it it's not this relation of um counter narrative in the sense of uh a story that's repressed gets told somewhere else and then eventually some very clever white academic will turn up and give it some airtime um that is actually the construction of um alternative uh infrastructure um alternative forms of justice um these aren't um storytelling initiatives these aren't um commemorative projects but they are uh real world um solutions based projects that are about uh really basic infrastructure sometimes especially um when you look at how memory of state violence interacted with the 2001 economic crisis in argentina um the the relationship between um the breakdown of of food infrastructure and the need to remember victims of a of state violence 20 30 years prior those things are entirely inseparable from one another and to separate them would would be kind of insulting to the to the wider political project so yeah i think it's allowing things to be enmeshed in a way that maybe seems uncomfortable for an academic who just wants to focus on one aspect of something if that makes sense yeah makes complete sense and hearing all of you talk about your research has been making me think about the the role that case studies have played in the history of human rights and the the role that they have to play methodologically within supply chain criticism and it strikes me that there's quite an acute problem or difficulty of scale i think on the one hand because of the sensational states of supply chains in the news right now um but then i think yeah and in a kind of more formal sense uh there are difficulties mapping or elucidating or otherwise coming to terms grammatically with something that is necessarily sprawling and changing i wonder if we could speak a bit more about that how attention to examples has helped you maintain a sense of pragmatism or feasibility in relation to the topics that you're dealing with and more broadly um that's a really good question about scale and precision i think but also methodological pragmatism because of course supply chain criticism implies that suddenly you're a leader and you're not a leader and you're not a leader like putting yourself in a position to talk about like the all of them and um that's not i think that that is exactly the opposite of what we imagine this sort of framework to be to consist of it's not a world systems analysis though it definitely borrows from the insights of that tradition i personally started thinking i need to have a better like more literacy around supply chains when i was finishing my first book and i was thinking seriously about what worlds are being written in the movements of matter through big industrial terminals like the port of amsterdam um and how those terminals what i'm calling what i call their terminal landscapes have a necessary material um uh form of determination on big planetary um let's say um processes like the recession of the greenland ice sheet where i was also doing a number of years of field work and also thinking about terminal landscapes so the greenland ice sheet is in terminal decline it is in terminal decline because it is in an interpretive relationship materially but also geopolitically now to um to the history of fossil capital and it is reading that history and it is writing a new kind of ground with the materiality of that description i think that dialectic was what i was concerned with let's say five six years ago but as i was finishing a book and i was really also preparing for the field arts residency where i first met alex and we were um you know we were thinking seriously with 20 other researchers artists um and practitioners in the context of imauda which is the logistical space that connects the port of amsterdam and the eye river to the north sea um we were thinking really seriously like how do we make decisions make critical decisions and how do we make decisions and how do we make decisions about what to pay attention to what stories to to read and what kinds of propositions to pursue uh when you're in a space of such incredible complexity and um you know and global connectivity and here are some answers that i have come up with i've come up with a couple but they're they're just like pragmatic one is um instead of taking the terminal as a space of determination think about the particular itinerary of one material so for instance i was trained as a as a scholar in the energy humanities and i was trained really to really seriously think about the determination of energy infrastructure specifically hydrocarbon energy infrastructures over forms of social relation and social forms that go um as neutralized and naturalized in the present that was like my training right that's a particular kind of supply chain it's like where coal oil natural gas comes from how they get to market what kinds of affordances they they provide and what kinds of technologies are intimately recursive to the specificity of those technologies and so i was trained as a scholar in the energy humanities energy infrastructures uh automobility you know our relationship to planetary air travel and so on and so forth but also electrical systems certainly but i was thinking okay what if we pick something that's not so combustible and not so spectacular in the imaginary of sort of late anthropogenic climate change and take something quite boring like phosphorus and what would happen if we were trained in the humanities and we decided to look at these individual elements and then teach ourselves in the language of those elements what kinds of stories what kinds of conflicts what kinds of relations are being written in the medium of that material and phosphorus took me to the western sahara where where 72% of internationally traded phosphorus is first mined in a situation of colonial occupation by the Moroccan army. And it has been occupied since the 1970s and has been recognized until very recently as sovereign territory of the Sarawak people. That is until the Abrahamic Accord signed by Trump and Netanyahu, at which point the Western Sahara became declared sovereign territory of Morocco. And that story is supposed to now be over. And yet there is a kind of socialist resurgence in the Western Sahara. And there is solidarity across the African Union to retrieve the value lost from those resources and return it to the sovereign people of the Western Sahara. That whole story is materially congealed in the phosphorus that flows through the port of Amsterdam and then is turned into industrial fertilizer, industrial fertilizer that underwrites the largest part of revenue. And that constitutes the Dutch economy and the industrial greenhouses of this country. You know, that's an example. One element, what are the territories that are entangled in its circulation, in its valuation, in its appropriation? What kinds of industrial processes recur as a consequence of the steady supply of those materials? And what are the forms of violence that are spectral to its loss of supply, right? And so when you have, for instance, a blockade, in the Strait of Hormuz, you also have a sudden depletion of primary materials required for the growing of industrial quantities of food that feed people all over the world. And now suddenly knowing a little bit about phosphorus helps you understand why that connection is there. So that's one example. It's like one element, track it, teach ourselves about it. How does it behave? What are the industrial histories that have summoned it into operation? And what are some of the geopolitical, geopolitical anxieties that lurk on the perimeters of those supply chains? There's more to say, but maybe, Alex, you want to give an example? I wanted to talk about spectacle. And Anna, your point about spectacle earlier, which is the ways in which supply chains increasingly become salient to us in a kind of a very big, broad, encompassing us through instances of like spectacularized breakdown or failure or in this sense as well, like occupation. So I'm thinking about Strait of Hormuz, but I'm also thinking about the other given incident from a few years back and any other kind of moment of like choke point stoppage. And my point was going to be around that, that that's a useful starting place, I think, for many people to become aware of supply chains and the ways in which they kind of shape everyday aspects of life. Like, I don't know what it's like actually in the Netherlands right now, but every other day in the UK, I wake up to an article about how the Strait of Hormuz is now going to impact severely, on energy prices and food prices down the line. And this is a kind of a narrative linkage that I don't think many people had in their heads before. One in terms of like the actual knowledge that that specific terrain is so embroiled within their everyday lives and their sense of like wellbeing and prosperity, but also just the sense in which like, well, what does oil got to do with food, right? So there's a kind of an interesting, kind of like two points of connection there. But what's interesting I think for us is like trying to move beyond these moments of spectacle, which gets so over-determined I think in particular, kind of like news media as being some sort of like leverage point or hinging moment in which like, oh, we could just block the Strait of Hormuz and then we can change the world how we want to see it. No, that's not entirely true. I think what spectacle has its use, it has its place, but it's not the end point of supply chain analysis. And it's certainly for us, I don't actually think is its start point either. What's actually interesting is the banality and how boring these places are. So Jeff was saying earlier about our first kind of like initial collaboration around field arts and going to the Port of Aymada, which I have probably pronounced terribly, but I don't care. But how boring that place is. And it was like the world, like the language of it is framed in sort of like a sense of like industrial grandeur and infrastructural like national identity, right? This is like the world's biggest sea lock. And it's got a multi-billion Euro project that's been in the making for years. And the thing doesn't fucking work, but you also wouldn't know it doesn't work unless you've kind of like had this chat with, I think it was a ferry operated that we were speaking to about it, Jeff. So it's not even like it was being reported on in the news of like Port of Aymada, spectacular breakdown of world's stupidest lock. It was just sort of like an everyday malfunctioning or basically because of the amount of salt water that gets brought into the North Sea Canal opening every, on the opening of every single lock, they couldn't actually open it for 24/7 access, which is what they originally built it for. They wanted it to be like a thruway that would be open 24/7 irrespective of tide and they can't do that because they didn't think about how salty the fucking sea is. But like, that's not a spectacular narrative of breakdown. That's just an everyday instance of logistical friction that is then sort of like absorbed by the different sort of supply chain networks themselves and different sort of economic and industrial responses to that moment of friction. So I guess my point was gonna be that spectacle is a really useful and a very easy point to talk about supply chains through, but actually these kind of like more banal everyday, frictions is the thing that I think, at least I find more interesting and how we're thinking of like things like counter logistics as having to exceed more than just these moments of interruption and breakdown, but having to kind of like identify these moments of stoppage and slippage, of stupidity as well. Like supply chains are also really stupid. Like I think there's this kind of big like corporate suggestion that supply chains are these like beautiful, smooth, operative systems, but they're not, they're massive, they're clunky. They're a huge kind of like intermodal points of suturing between spaces, terrains, and different sort of like laboring forces that are actually like really important inlets into sort of like how to recalibrate or retune or reconfigure them. But that is, those moments of like interruption or intervention are not at the level of spectacle. There are far more everyday basis and a far more banal basis than is otherwise like immediately legible to us, I think on like a global narrative scale. - Yeah. That's a great point on the banality of supply chains. I should mention that Flo had to leave. So for the rest of the interview, it's just gonna be the three of us. And Jeff, Alex, I wonder if you guys want to talk a bit more about your research into the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act. I know that that's something you're both working on at the moment. - Yeah, so I think we both have turned our attention from different directions towards what in the European context at least, we call the Critical Raw Materials Act, which was first passed in 2023, but it's been revised and it essentially is modeling itself on similar legislation passed in the United States and in Canada and the UK. All of which, you know, can probably be understood as like the turn towards strategic critical supply chains and they're strategic and critical for very specific kinds of state building initiatives in the, what we would call it. So let's say the kind of Western power blocks, but that itself is also starting to disaggregate as a consequence of sort of Trump too, but we'll see what happens in the next couple of years. But in general, it's sort of, you know, so back to your question about scale, this is a framework that we have taken as a kind of text, right? It's a way of writing a variety of futures into the funding mandates of both private and public sector researchers in the European Union. And the act among other things beyond declaring using two metrics, one, supply chain risk, the other economic importance, declaring 34 materials, critically important for the quote, economic prosperity of the European Union by 2050. And doing so through what they call quote the twin transition. And that involves a transition towards renewable technologies on the one hand and computational forms of productivity explicitly on the other. And you can see why this is all also clearly relevant for questions around, around AI and the, the rapid shift in, and we could say, you know, white collar forms of labor all over the world, but also the energy, the energy costs of, of this, of this emergence of, of AI. And so all of this, you know, there's very varieties of stories and territories inculcated in this, this declaration of the critical raw materials act. And it's a bit unwieldy, but at the heart of it is really back to this question of, you know, what, what it, what it is that supply chains do. It's a proposition about the next 30 years of economic relation, of mining and specific places in order to secure these 34 materials, which are all uniquely relevant for the production of 15 types of commodities, which have been detailed in the act, 15 types of commodities that make up a kind of a picture of 2050 capitalism that is renewable. It's computationally robust and is maybe more importantly is secure. From external contestation or supply disruption. The act itself scapegoats China as the real culprit or the problem really that it's trying to solve. And that to a certain extent is true that it is from the perspective of European capitalism, a bit of a problem. And the longer story of why it is that the Chinese and economy was able to develop these supply chains, you know, especially, you know, first and second stage supply chains, mining and processing and why the Western economies were not, actually economically able or interested in doing that is a different story, but not an unrelated one. Um, but the, the, the larger kind of propositional force of this act is really to expedite investment research, including at universities through horizon, which is one of the sponsors of the, of the act. Um, but also, um, the actual emergence of the supply chains themselves, fast tracking environmental and social assessment in mostly territories that have, uh, that, that do not belong to the European union. And so of the 34 raw materials, the European union has no more than 10% domestic supply of these materials. That means the vast majority of future supply will come from external, external to its borders. And our research is increasingly showing that the vast majority of it or a significant unremarked quantity of these materials will come from the circumpolar North in indigenous territories. And so one of the projects I'm developing is a, is a, is a large, you know, multi-partner five, six year, uh, project to study the construction of those critical corridors coming from the circumpolar North out of various parts of Northern, what we call Northern Canada, but also Greenland. And then converging in the, uh, processing and assembly terminals of Western Europe, beginning with Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and then continuing to the rural region and to Hamburg. Um, and so that's part of, uh, that's part of a large project to say that the ways in which as academics in the European union, we do, research and apply for funding from the European union is, is, is intimately tied to the very same funding apparatuses and mandates that are advancing this kind of explicitly neocolonial, uh, hyper capitalist form of computational renewability by 2050. And that is a problem that needs to be at least from noted, minimally noted. Yeah. I mean, like one thing that I think is interesting as well by taking this, um, the critical materials that it does that kind of the framing for how to think through, uh, the next like phase of capitalism is going to develop is also that it makes us look beyond the kind of the more, again, like the more salient ideas of like what a supply chain is and where it operates. Like I think the image of the mine or the ship or the port are really kind of key images that spring to mind when you say supply chain, um, less so is the recycling hub or, um, perhaps sort of like literally what I was saying earlier, sort of, I don't know, the energy that you use in your own home, like that is also part of a supply chain. So what's kind of interesting when you look through these materials, which we do on Friday night, because we have nothing else to do in our lives, um, is to think about the ways in which this kind of narrative of securitization of the actual term, the way in which critical is being like clearly like weaponized in lots of ways, like, and quite like civilian. Um, it's a shame that Flo had to run off to, um, perform her duties at work because she would maybe be able to speak to more around the juridical language of what critical means, um, and what that allows for in terms of forms of state security. Like if you'll seem to interrupt a critical supply line, you are a state terrorist. Um, and there's increasingly laws around that in, in various kind of Western hemisphere, um, uh, states. What was my point? My point was going to be that, um, we also need to think about the ways in which this, the fact of the EU wants to have all its critical materials, but you can't actually change the place where a deposit of cobalt occurs or where lithium occurs. So even if there are kind of like, um, prospective mining operations that are being drawn through sort of Sámi territory or other sort of like, uh, indigenous whole like spaces that are contained within the sort of state apparatus of Europe, ultimately there is still going to be a need to kind of engage with international parties. But what's happening in order to kind of, again, circumvent that is a massive uptake on, um, yeah, internal recycling projects and refining projects. So, uh, for example, again, in Scotland, like there's a big turn to decommissioning and e-waste salvaging that is becoming a new horizon of capitalist accumulation in response to the fact that actually the EU wants to keep all its minerals in place. Sure, we might source them from elsewhere, but once they're here, we can find ways of keeping them in this particular economic zone rather than kind of like relying on this kind of geophysical or sort of like telluric definition of where these materials come from. Um, so like the supposed, I guess the point I'm trying to say is like the end of the supply chain is becoming a bit more nebulous as well in terms of what are the ends of this kind of like prospective suggestion of where do we get elements from, how do we process them, how do we keep them, retain them within this kind of particular European commodity system as well. Like it's just not, it's not quite clear yet where those, um, what those jobs are going to be, what those locations are going to be, what those kind of, um, uh, infrastructures are going to be yet. That's why they are still also as well. That's part of the proposition that these supply chains are kind of presenting to us. And I think maybe there's like a final point about, about that, um, grammar of the supply chain, which is almost always in the propositional, it's always in the normative, right? Supply chains are normative. They supply the resources and forms of value accumulation that are legislatively, um, reasonable within a tradition of largely settler colonial and hyper-capitalist states, states that imagine external territories to be sovereign grounds for dispossession and exploitation. Um, and, and that normative, uh, grammar of the supply chain is, is a problem. Clearly it's a problem to critique. It's part of what we're trying to obviously center in our analysis and engagement with both the kind of modeling of these supply chains, the language that is used to reason them, but also the actual fields, the concrete ecological logistical spaces where these are being negotiated by, by actually by, by, you know, by real actors. Um, and, and I think one way we could then say in a way that, you know, the, the relevance of criticality is essentially to, let's say problematize the kind of propositional normative impulse of these spaces. Um, that would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do given the traditions that we inherit in the humanities, but it's not actually what we would like to collectively think about in this symposium that we put together for next year, sponsored by Nika. We want instead to think, well, we want to sort of insist actually that any form of social reproduction normative or otherwise rights itself and makes itself modally possible through supply chains. Invariably, you know, any kind of social relation collective project is a proposition about the future. It's also a proposition about how it will get its resources, what terms of care and reciprocity will ground the criteria of its own sociality. So we're never going to not be at the intersection of various kinds of supply chains. We always will be. And so we, so the, the, the argument is rather instead of problematizing the, frankly, quite obvious, like issues associated with the contemporary turn to critical raw materials, uh, even though literacy around them is quite low, the problems are very obvious, but what's much more exciting, I think, to us is to think, okay, what kinds of supply chains would we want to actually be actively giving our time to developing and working with? Um, what kinds of, what forms of energy production and food production, uh, are, can we learn from what forms of sociality and what forms of energy production, uh, can we learn from what forms of sociality and food production, uh, care and solidarity that can, you know, materially ground a practice of critique that is not, that is not, um, that for which the horizon is simply not, let's say, literally in this case, the horizon funding organization, right? It's actually building worlds that we can get excited about building as opposed to critiquing worlds that we're fucking sick of. You know, of course they have to go together, but the former is just as important. I think that's what, what we're trying to get at is like, there's a form of, there's a, there's an account of social reproduction that I think is far more tangible and, you know, messy and not so kind of purified according to our anti-normative desires, whatever they may be that you can find in supply chains and that indeed are going to require supply chains to nourish. Um, and that's one of the things we want the symposium to sort of come out with is like a much more tangible set of propositions about what are the supply chains we want to fight for and which ones would we like to dismantle actively? Great. Um, maybe you can speak a bit more about the symposium. So the symposium is inviting, um, students, researchers, artists, activists to come together in March, 2027 in Amsterdam, um, to learn together, to teach each other, but also learn from one another about particular supply chains that we are, are concerned with, should be concerned with, are not yet concerned with, would like to, um, build propositions around, would like to destroy. And, uh, the idea of the, the, the idea of the symposium is really like a kind of extended skillshare exercise because a lot of us have certain kinds of methodological techniques or tricks that we bring, um, that are codified variously and recognized or legitimated variously in our disciplines. And, uh, supply chain criticism asks that in any given research projects, in any given case study, in any given skills, you, um, you work with, you work eminent to the methodologies that are, that are, um, um, you know, shaping and, and, and, and determining, uh, what it is that's happening there. So at any given moment, I think any practitioner in this field is going to feel at a loss. And so the symposium is an opportunity for people to come together and say, well, listen, have you thought about this? GIS technique. Have you thought about this tracking website? Have you thought about this archive? Uh, here's how i've worked with it what maybe you should work with it as well um we'd like at the end of the symposium which is probably gonna be two or three days to obviously engage in a little bit of field excursion activity um and get into some trouble but um we're also in conversation with a number of possible publication outlets um where we will hopefully put together a collection that really speaks maybe more directly and explicitly to what we're calling the kind of theater of supply which is to say the theatricality of existing critical legislation that that seeks to dramatize really dramatize the urgency and the investment capacities required to just secure european sovereignty through the supply chains of materials that do not belong to it thank you that sounds really exciting um for me at least projects like this also bring to the a question that i think has been lurking throughout this conversation which is that of the university as a supply chain um insofar as it's dependent on sociality funding circulation distribution of resources um yeah and i'd like to ask how or whether you guys are navigating this dynamic in your research um this kind of tension between a desire to attend to the material in a serious and intentionally useful way versus a kind of threat or temptation even of what some people might think of as a more neoliberal compulsion towards instrumentality or usefulness within the humanities as they pertain to i guess real world issues i'll say a couple things about about that it's a really really good question and i think it there's a version of this question that's asking about like what the humanities are being asked to become in the next 20 years that we maybe can't speak to directly but i think it is there i don't think it's so hard to get funding for these kinds of projects and i think the reason for that is because humanities scholars know a fuck of a lot more about the world than we convince ourselves we know not only that but we actually know how to ask questions that other kinds of disciplines simply cannot ask and when we do those ask those questions in spaces like um in conversations about you know the future of energy supply or the ethics of ai or or or let's say more technical questions that we would expect other disciplines to be nominated to address actually people in the room pay quite close attention to what is at stake in the forms of questioning that we're bringing um if we're confident enough to do so without hiding behind tight very very tired and outdated defenses and defensiveness around what the humanities is and is not and that has been my experience i mean also teaching philosophy and i think we should be thinking more actively about like the analytic groundwork of our own attachments and propositions and practices because actually they are grounded in really solid forms of reasoning but often we are we shy away from defending or reconstructing those forms of reasoning and supply chains are forms of reasoning and there are forms of reasoning that go unchecked unmarked and they're deeply they're you know the set they're the beating heart of future conflict and that is partially why you know the kind of anticipatory nature of what some of this research is inviting scholars to think about together um like practices that will help build solidarities for conflicts to come as opposed to only ever reconstructing or repairing past injustices though the latter is deeply important for the former um i think is only possible because actually there is an epistemic affordance to humanistic inquiry that we can't just we can't just pretend is you know is not epistemological to do so is really to shoot ourselves in the foot and say we actually only work in fragments in undecidability we only work in the imaginary and that is that is a very weird thing to organize an entire faculty of a university around yeah and then i mean as we were saying earlier this kind of internal disavowal of usefulness seems to be generating or at least preempting the script for its own defunding but honestly that's also been like this that's been the script since i started graduate school and i'm not going to tell you how long ago that was but you know i and it is an accurate description of how the university functions but it's also an inaccurate description of how the university functions there's lots of departments that get cut they're not always humanities departments and the idea that we need to only ever produce like economic value for the university is a bit of a straw man that at times is real but is also not it you know it i think it depends on a lot of different factors for sure clearly the humanities the least valued of all the faculties but there is i think there is reason to not build a defensive posture on as a consequence of those sort of narratives we tell ourselves but instead to insist like you know we actually not only do we know things about the world we actually know things that other disciplines do not know about the world and you know insisting on certain kinds of quite like trite conservative and you know precious ideas of of like taste and meaning making and fragmentation and difference alone is like that is a deeply unconvincing way of of uh of advocating for what it is that we actually are capable of doing and knowing and producing even if those those concepts are central components of the kind of larger ethics of what it is that the humanities takes takes it upon itself to advocate for and i think you know the infrastructural turn 20 years ago is a good example of this um and i think that there is actually a lot of new money being directed at universities in different contexts the uk is the exception um but in in the dutch context in the canadian context and i think it will be true in the u.s in the number of years at the moment clearly no um there's a lot of money actually being earmarked for i wouldn't say traditional humanities projects but i would say the kinds of projects that lend themselves to humanities-based inquiry absolutely and they you know might require us to work eminent to certain kinds of languages that we're not comfortable with but that actually i think is a skill that we should be really good at we should be comfortable strategically working within languages where we're provisionally uncomfortable with um because i mean we do that anyways at least in the critical humanities we work eminent to the worlds and forms of objects that bear the trace of barbarism all the time in our critical inquiry um and we comfort ourselves we for we develop a form of familiarity with those spaces in order to then understand how the logic that we are seeking to understand in order to dismantle work um i think that works too with you know questions around sustainable prosperity or you know the twin transition or just whatever okay so would you say it's about then refining and recognizing the value of existing skill sets you know when a bunch of like humanity scholars find themselves standing in like an industrial terminal looking around a good question to ask is what the fuck are you doing now like what is it you think you're doing now what do you think you're gonna do there um and we do ask ourselves that question all the time you know and often that this form of research which is field and practice-based is very difficult to do and i think it's very frustrating you know you're often in spaces that are recalcitrant that are uh coded to be indifferent to your presence and also often of course are dependent on on producing forms of opacity that prevent any kind of contestation having said that it's not as though the form of like what we're we're asking quite simple questions of these kinds of industrial spaces these supply chain logistical spaces right how is it written through what forms of reason are these kinds of processes legitimated at whose expense who is making meaning in this space whose form of meaning making is rendered meaningless what are the propositions about the future that are imminent to the materiality and the forms of economic relation of this space these are perfectly reasonable questions to ask unreasonable questions to ask is how do we protect this space how do we grow it rapidly to keep up with a two percent gdp metric uh without which our entire economy club that's an unreasonable that's a deeply unreasonable question to ask how do we keep certain kinds of people out you know um how do we recreate just legislative criteria so that uh a genocide one part of the world where certain kinds of materials originate has can never be cited as a as a conflict intimate to the valuation and profit of the materiality of the materiality of the materiality of the materiality of the material here in this part of the world that those are unreasonable questions those are really fucking unreasonable questions but they are the forms of reason that create the norms and smoothness however fictional they are of of logistical spaces so we're actually like asking quite conventional questions that you ask of all kinds of things in the world in the humanities right and of course that also includes learning with the orientation of the of the thick aesthetic that actually surprisingly always accompany these logistical spaces and i think alex you great to hear about the archival work you're you're going to go do in california but these are spaces of labor these are spaces of these are spaces of conflict these are spaces where you know forms of culture making are are are embedded in the lifeblood of its of its memory even if that memory is suppressed even if that memory is is insurgent right and so also learning how to read for the this the the um the signature of that history of struggle and the forms of held those struggles to form is part of what we're doing as well and that is like a very traditional way of thinking about what the humanities are doing absolutely it's just that the kinds of objects that we turn our attention to might feel a little bit strange right a tanker is not the same as a poem but there there's a way in which like they are writing worlds in for it with certain forms of reason that can be read even if the forms of reason require a completely different language to understand and to and to historicize i mean that like just kind of exhaustively answered the question in a really beautiful way like i i kind of flippantly when you sent through the questions and preparing for today about like modes like what does the humanities perspective on these places give us like well if you can read a book you can read a bridge and i was kind of being a bit stupid like that but i mean it i mean it in some way i i do i actually kind of say this in my various courses that i've managed to kind of like cultivate here at glasgow over the last few years which are all in some way or form they feel increasingly distant from literature in a kind of very traditional sense but there's a there's a reason i still define myself as a lecturer in literary studies is because those kind of like disciplinary groundings of exactly what jeff is kind of highlighting there in terms of the modes of reading the forms of legibility the ways of kind of saying sensitive um to these kind of vernacular forms of of history making of struggle um which are always a question of aesthetics right like aesthetics is not just about like what's what's hot right now or what's beautiful aesthetics is a way of determining the world that we live in of making things sensible across different forms of like literally like how do we make sense of things and how do we sense things right there's kind of like two kind of um variances of sense so i think literature is perfectly suited as is cultural analysis more widely and other kind of like arts based subjects as a way of like sensing the world around us um and the kind of the tools and methodologies that we train our students in and invite students to kind of help train us as well um like i'm always every i've been running these courses now for several years and every year i have a new kind of like dimension that's brought out just from how students are engaging with the world through very different forms because i'm not gen z um and i don't see things exactly the same anymore right although someone's earlier complimented my skirt as it was very gen z so i felt great um was it a compliment we'll find out um but yeah the sense of like your literary like i can still do literary studies without having read a book it's something that i've kind of literally said to a colleague the other day like i can't remember the last time i sat down with like an actual collection of poetry or a short story um but i can think about the last time i sat down with a piece of massive infrastructure and thought very clearly about what was the world that it's made spain and then this project that jeff was alluding to which maybe fingers crossed i'll get some funding to go and do is uh an archive of uh that kind of really sits at a nexus of like kind of um i guess infrastructure and uh creative creativity where uh in the 1970s a writers collective emerged on out the port of oakland which at the time was the world's like one of the world's biggest container ports in the 70s it got very soon was taken over by uh port of los angeles which is now i think number one in the world and number two to rotterdam um but port of oakland is where the container kind of like took root and was kind of first established as a major kind of form of logistical technology and there's this writers collective that emerged from within within the sort of longshoreman community specifically where they were writing poems taking photographs making short films performances around the ways in which these logistical technologies were actively transforming the landscapes around them and not just the physical landscapes but their social relations underpinning them so going back to this whole point of social reproduction earlier like that archive is literally a reservoir of workers grappling with massive structural changes on like a kind of a global scale at the same time engaging the sort of like local determinancies of sort of like issues around union organization where they're going to get their like you know the next paycheck for rent for housing for food for reproducing their families um and they're using poetry and performance as a means of sort of like reckoning with these massive changes in a way that is more than just sort of recording them it's not a sense of just sort of like registering that this stuff is happening but actively coming together to think about what is it we do want to provision what are the supply chains local to us that we actually want to keep what are the forms of world building that we can engage these infrastructures with that will help us to be able to do that and i think that's a really important part of the work that we're doing and i think that will allow us to continue a world uh in a way yeah a mode of life that is equitable justifiable uh justifiable just prosperous whatever you want to use that kind of terms um and there are archives like that all over the world that aren't necessarily registered as archives uh or not kind of presented to us as explicit sort of like literary forms or cultural forms but they're there they are there in those kind of vernacular forms of organizing they're in meetings they're in sort of newsletters or uh short sort of like zine formats as well they're like i see floating around glasgow all the time um so yeah so that that is also the kind of like the grounds of literary analysis of artistic analysis is thinking about those kind of modes of social struggle that aren't literally connected in a book format as yet there you go yeah and i think your question as well but like are we losing something i'm like no all we ever do is is gain by working with others and thinking with others and kind of like dipping into different disciplines the whole time like yeah i i read cultural geography i read policy papers i read a range of things that i thought i'd never would i'm reading a book at the moment about the emergence of business logistics i feel disgusting but it's really helpful um but i'm only able to read them in the way i read them because i have a grounding literary and cultural analysis yeah perfect i'm thinking about what you said earlier alex about the the actually quite mundane nature of supply chains and i'm wondering if in that vein you have any suggestions for listeners in i guess ways of kind of incorporating a supply chain critical perspective in everyday context as well as the academic maybe reading recommendations like that i'm wondering if you have any suggestions for listeners too if you have any which i'm sure you have lots of um i mean yeah this is really yeah a really great piece by uh campbell diamante uh she came out last well supply chain criticism no that's a facetious answer but also it is great um but i think uh to the question about what do we want people to come away with i think is i'm just going to refer back to jeff's like really beautiful articulation of this earlier in terms of what would it mean to trace a particular element like how or like think about a particular logistical site and what it's mediating like these are the things that are really important to me and i think it's really important to kind of like for me the entry points into like when you start to think how to think with a supply chain um those are the things um that spring to mind of like what are the actual cited grounds of your your actual like uh inquiry who what are the laboring communities around them in particular like for me like you can't think about supply chains without thinking about labor um like that's a really really cool thing and i think for some reason an element of the humanities that sometimes people seem to shy away from for some reason i'm not quite sure there's no foundation for that i'm just going to claim it um but um yeah and think about the solidarities that you want to build and connect between them this kind of the sense of uh propositional critique is always about yeah what are you going to build and sustain so it's not just like what are you analyzing interrogating identifying like what do you want to build through that kind of like moment of revelation or exposure of a particular supply chain network like what do you want to do with it um is my kind of question and who do you who do you want to like who are you bringing into your conversations and collaborations um those are my kind of initial thoughts on that yeah i think i think that's uh a really great place to begin i mean supply chain criticism is just like whatever it's a set of words that ask you to think really simply about how the world that you inhabit is put together and and then to get a little bit more technical with people around you about tracking how that put togetherness is actually quite contingent and that contingency the site the sources and sites of that contingency are not at all they're very concrete just takes a little bit of research to figure out where it comes from but literally everything in wherever you're listening to this it doesn't matter where you are unless you're like i suppose walking up in the dolomites or something but otherwise like if you're in a bedroom or a classroom or on the train or whatever like you're surrounded by objects that are contingent and they are contingent in the measure that they come from are resourced through determined by supply chains no supply chains aggregate materials from all over the world under various under various you know historical conditions and the ways in which they are valued which is to say as commodities as they behave on a market is also part of a set of you know interacting logistical systems that have been over time to reproduce and neutralize a form of economic relation that we now do not bother to contest when we go and buy you know our fruit at the grocery store the price is a kind of metaphysical declaration as opposed to something determined um and so i think it's just a way of like getting kind of technical but also really kind of simple about the world that you're you're inhabiting and recognizing that actually there's you know we we actually have the tools to you know map those contingencies in really generative ways and those kinds of conflicts that are just behind the corner of any supply chain are actually you know usually a walking distance away from where you live and so there's like good reason to like ground as alex was saying or locate your your inquiry in in this in the logistical spaces that provision you with the you know with the forms of privilege and and also you know forms of power and disempowerment that characterize your life great yeah um that's beautiful and I think a nice place to end um thank you so much for all the time that you took with the questions I really appreciated the thoughtfulness and learned a lot from the conversation people who've listened this far will notice that we've had some technical mishaps with changing rooms etc everything being online um but yeah I really hope people enjoy this conversation we hope listeners do too absolutely yeah I hope yeah I hope at least it's sort of like you know it feels a little bit like a jolt to be like oh wait why do I think the way I think even if you return to the kinds of things that you you do practice and believe in at least you know hopefully it's a kind of occasion to be like well is there is there a necessary materialist basis for what it is that I'm working through and and are there supply chains that are relevant to the case studies I'm working on historically or in the present answer is probably yes and you know it might it might help with the analytic responsibility of our you know research to just sort of acknowledge that a bit you Thank you.