Logistics could not contain what it had relegated to the hold. It cannot. Robert F. Harney, the historian of migration 'from the bottom-up,' used to say once you crossed the Atlantic, you were never on the right side again. B Jenkins, a migrant sent by history, used to turn a broken circle in the basement floor to clear the air when welcoming her students, her panthers. No standpoint was enough, no standpoint was right. She and their mothers and fathers tilled the same fields, burned up the same desert roads, preoccupied the same merely culinary union... The standpoint of no standpoint, everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing. If the proletariat was thought capable of blowing the foundations sky high, what of the shipped, what of the containerized? What could such flesh do? Logistics somehow knows that it is not true that we do not yet know what flesh can do. There is a social capacity to instantiate again and again the exhaustion of the standpoint as undercommon ground that logistics knows as unknowable, calculates as an absence that it cannot have but always longs for, that it cannot but long to be or, at least, to be around, to surround. Logisitics senses this capacity as never before – this historical insurgent legacy, this historicity, this logisticality, of the shipped.

Modernity is sutured by this hold. This movement of things, unformed objects, deformed subjects, nothing yet and already. This movement of nothing is not just the origin of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity will have at its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this interdicted, outlawed social life of nothing.