Week 7 - The Forgotten Space

Philippa Towlson — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:46:54 GMT

World Literature and the Anthropocene - Week 7

Clip from ‘The Forgotten Space’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDyD40-cyk

Selected quotes from/notes on the clip:
- ‘The unlikely story of a steel box that changed the world trading system…’
- ‘Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery?’
- Does the shipping container ‘…throw the world out of balance?’
- ‘the centre of gravity in the maritime world has shifted East’
- ‘By the late 1970s, containers were the standard way of moving manufactured goods between the capitalist economies.’
- ‘Automation does not guarantee freedom from drudgery, it merely raises drudgery to a higher power.’
- ‘Between 1950-2010…global shipping tonnages increased by a rate more than nearly three times the population.’
- ‘The war against rust: washing, chipping, painting; washing, chipping, painting.’
- ‘The ability to ship these goods, has made it possible to produce large volumes, and the production of large volumes has brought down the prices.’
- constant shifting and shipping of production, labour and wealth, in the search of cheap labour - case in point: China and its increased economic dependence on ‘the maritime world’
- 13:10 / start- ‘A necessary condition is that capitalism must have high profits…The capitalist will relocate capital to areas where wages are lower.’ end / 14:04
- ’60% of China’s exports to the US are produced by American-owned multinational companies.’
- 100,000,000 young migrants from poor, rural areas of China currently fulfilling the industrial need for cheap labour
- 17:16 / start - ‘One question we can raise now…that will have serious implications for the viability of global capitalism in the future.’ end / 17:45

Other things that may be intersting look at:

* Website for ’The Forgotten Space’: http://www.theforgottenspace.net/static/photos.html
* Dona Haraway on the Chthulucene: http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf
* Blue Planet II controversy: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/23/captive-wildlife-footage-blue-planet-2-bbc1-totally-true-to-nature-say-producers
* David Harvey, The Space and Time of Value (Lecture): http://davidharvey.org/2016/11/david-harvey-marx-capital-lecture-4-space-time-value/

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Week 7 - The Forgotten Space