Society and space

Allan Sekula and Noël Burch (2010) The Forgotten Space, Amsterdam: Doc.Eye / Vienna: WILDart, 111 minutes (http://www.theforgottenspace.net).

A story of capitalism, Marx teaches, is a story about secrets, a story about hidden truths, a story about forgettings, and the key vehicle of capitalist obfuscation is the commodity. In the commodity,

The social character of men’s [sic] labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour … [in the commodity,] there … is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (Marx, 1887: 46-47).

Trailer for The Forgotten Space (2010)

In Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space, the key vehicle for obscuring the underlying workings of capitalism is not the commodity but the shipping container in which the commodity is transported. Like the commodity analyzed by Marx, the shipping container is visible, but only for what it hides. Analysis therefore requires one to peel off layers of obfuscation. Just as Marx’s project of uncovering the ‘secret’ social relations of production that are hidden behind the commodity became ultimately a multifaceted study of capitalism, Sekula and Burch’s study of the seemingly humble shipping container expands into a study of containerization. And containerization, it is revealed, represents and enables a series of technological and structural transformations that have added a new dimension to capitalist globalization by enhancing the speed and efficiency of transportation through new levels of abstraction. An outer shell of corrugated steel is placed around the commodity, and this new, impenetrable cloak further obscures the social relations of production by which commodities, spaces, and indeed the means of human existence are reproduced. Sekula and Burch’s aim is to bring these forgotten spaces of containerization out into the open, and, in the process, to reveal their secrets.

Notwithstanding the singular title, the film’s power lies in the way it depicts a range of spaces that are ‘forgotten’ amidst the mobilities of global capitalism. The port, formerly at the centre of the maritime city, is relocated to a peripheral, cordoned off warehouse complex staffed by a skeleton crew that has little to no physical contact with the container, let alone the commodity. Thus the port is forgotten by urban residents. Transportation inland from the port is channelled into dedicated high-speed freight corridors in which, to quote the driver of a train on one such corridor in The Netherlands, ‘it’s like a long tunnel’. These transit corridors would be forgotten as well, were it not for the noise of the speeding train permeating through open cuts in the countryside. The commodity itself is all but forgotten within the sterile space of the container. Workers in the shipping industry often have no idea what they are transporting. The sea, which formerly had provided a counter-narrative of freedom and unpredictability amidst the regimentation of the capitalist organization of space is forgotten by the crews of factory-like containerships that read computer screens instead of feeling the rhythm of the waves and the gusts of the winds. And, although little is made of this point in the film, it goes without saying that all of these spaces—the port, the ship, the train, the truck, the sea, and the internal space of the container—are forgotten by consumers. When a commodity arrives at one’s door, or is picked off a shelf, its underlying processes of transportation, like its underlying processes of production, are obscured and abstracted, as are the social relations and labour arrangements that enable these processes to function. As Sekula argues in his 1995 book (and photo exhibition) Fish Story, the modern intermodal transport industry represents a particularly advanced form of the capitalist processes of abstraction—and, one could add, ‘forgetting’— identified by Marx (Sekula, 1995).

The spaces of transportation are not the only forgotten spaces featured in the film. Sekula and Burch also profile some of the forgotten spaces between the networks of mobility that lie at the heart of the capitalist globalization network: a tent city in southern California wedged between two railroad lines; a spit of land jutting into Long Beach harbour where working class families picnic while containerships cruise by in the background; a concrete plaza beneath high rise bank buildings in Hong Kong where Filipino migrant workers gather on Sundays. And there are spaces that, although remembered, are seen as having little value, such as the village of Doel, Belgium, which is set to be demolished to make way for an expansion of the port of Antwerp. Doel may well be on its way to becoming yet another forgotten space, with forgotten people.

The Forgotten Space is a deceptively simple film. Each segment (with the possible exception of the final segment in Bilbao) contains a straightforward narrative. Taken as a whole, however, The Forgotten Space is both complex and ambitious. Sekula and Burch faced a difficult task in making the film. Since their goal was to make a film about containerization and all of its social implications, and not about the container itself, they needed a way to present the object in a way that would undermine, rather than reproduce, its fetishization. Here, they turned to the Marxist realist tradition of filmmakers like Dziga Vertov that prevailed in the first decades of the Soviet Union. Vertov used a series of then-innovative cinematic techniques to re-arrange time and space in a documentary, but non-linear format. Production, transportation, and consumption of the commodity were depicted as simultaneous occurrences so that the underlying social relations behind the commodity form (the ‘secrets’ decried by Marx) were revealed to the viewer (Vertov, 1984). But Vertov’s task was relatively easy: he could (quite literally) zoom in on the commodity to anchor his study and then problematize that focus in order to reveal underlying structural dynamics. In contrast, Sekula and Burch’s focus is on the movement of commodities (and the related mobilities and immobilities of labour, production facilities, transport infrastructure, investment capital, etc.), and this has left them with a more problematic visual target. After all, how does one visualize mobility without reducing it to the objects being moved, the infrastructure that facilitates movement, the labour expended in making movement happen, the movement of the vessel, or the surface upon which movement occurs? How does one make a film about the containerized economy without finding oneself ‘boxed in’ by the container? Sekula’s answer, in his still photography as well as his films, is to provide diegetic narrative beyond the images, explicitly making links to draw out underlying connections. Thus, his photography, whether displayed in a gallery or a book, is accompanied by lengthy, insightful essays (Buchloh, 1995 and 2011) and his films make extensive (although not excessive) use of voice-over narration.

Even with these narrative linkages between the images, the diffuse nature of the subject matter leads to some ambiguity regarding what the film is fundamentally about. Precisely, what is the forgotten space? Is it the sea, the ship, the port, the container, the networks of mobility that power the capitalist world-economy, or the interstices that are passed by between the webs of these networks? At one point in the film, the narrator (Sekula) acknowledges the relevance of this question by calling the sea ‘the most forgotten space’, but that hardly resolves the question. A 2011 symposium on the film at New York City’s Cooper Union was titled ‘Forgotten Spaces’ in apparent recognition of its geographic plurality.

‘Forgotten Spaces’ symposium, New York, 2011, with David Harvey, Benjamin Buchloh, and Allan Sekula

I am aware of two commentaries on the film by geographers, and it is notable that both of these implicitly acknowledge the film’s wandering geographic referent by pointing out that The Forgotten Space is not primarily a film about the sea. At the Cooper Union forum, David Harvey stated,

The central figure in the film is, of course, the container… I know Allan’s been very interested in the oceans and the seas, but the thing that really struck me here is how passive the sea had become. … It is imagined that you can just ride across the surface in an unruffled way and that you can just bring the world together in a unity of production and consumption (Harvey, 2011).

In other words, in the capitalist imagination, the sea is idealized as a flat surface in which space is abstracted from geophysical reality. As the sea’s space is reduced to an abstract quantity of distance, or time, it is constructed as amenable to annihilation by technologies that enable the compression (or, better yet, the transcendence) of space-time, like the containership. While this construction of the ocean provides rich material for geographers of capitalism and modernity (e.g. Steinberg, 2001), it provides precious little material for filmmakers. Under capitalism, the ocean is valued only in its (idealized) absence, and absence is notoriously difficult to film. Thus, as Brett Story, the other geographer who has commented on the film, has noted, ‘he film spends surprisingly little time on actual water’ (Story, 2012: 1576, emphasis added). By my count, only about ten minutes of the 110-minute film are spent at sea (all on the Hanjin Budapest) and even in this footage the material ocean is not a force that needs to be reckoned with, except as a source of rust.

For viewers who are familiar with Sekula’s book Fish Story, as well as with his other film The Lottery of the Sea, the relative absence of the ocean in The Forgotten Space is, as Story suggests, surprising. In contrast with The Forgotten Space, Fish Story begins with a meditation on the ‘crude materiality’ of the sea (Sekula, 1995: 12) and he reminds the reader throughout the book that the ocean’s materiality persists despite the best intentions of capital to wash it away. Thus, for instance, we learn in Fish Story that ‘large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of [the twentieth] century’ (Sekula, 1995: 50). In Fish Story, the ocean is a space of contradictions and a non-human actor in its own right. However, no such references to the sea’s geophysical materiality and the barriers that this might pose to its idealization as a friction-free surface of movement appear in The Forgotten Space.

Human frictions on the sea likewise feature in Fish Story: militant seafarers, longshoremen, and mutineers all make appearances in the text. In contrast, these individuals receive scant attention in The Forgotten Space (a point noted by Story as well), and much of the attention that they do receive is about their failings. A relatively hopeful account of union organizing in Los Angeles is paired with a story of labour’s defeat in the face of automation in Rotterdam and that of a faded movement in Hong Kong where the union hall has become a social club for retirees and their widows.

For Sekula, the heterotopia of the ship celebrated by Foucault has become a neoliberal dystopia. The world of containerization is Foucault’s dreaded ‘civilization without boats, in which dreams have dried up, espionage has taken the place of adventure, and the police have taken the place of pirates’ (adapted from Foucault, 1986: 27). Echoing Foucault, Sekula asks near the beginning of the film, ‘Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery?’ Although Sekula never answers this question directly, his response would seem to be in the affirmative: the sea is no longer a romantic space of resistance; it has been tamed.

Sekula and Burch’s failure to depict the ocean as a space of dialectical encounters (whether between humans or among human and non-human elements) reproduces a dematerialization of the sea that is frequently found in narratives of globalization, including critical narratives (Steinberg, 2013). This leads the filmmakers to inadvertently reaffirm the capitalist construction of the ocean as an external space beyond politics. By turning away from the frictions encountered at sea, Sekula and Birch end up tacitly endorsing the very ‘forgetting’ of the sea promoted by capital, as it subscribes to an ideology of limitless mobility.

During the Cooper Union forum, David Harvey, who otherwise lauds the film, seems a bit frustrated by its failure to indicate a political programme. Although he does not elaborate on this critique, I would suggest that at least part of the problem stems from the film’s failure to translate the general contradictions within capitalism into an interpretation of the more specific contradictions within the forgotten space of the sea (or, more broadly, within the forgotten space of logistics, as is explored by Cowen, 2010). The dialectics of the ocean, which flow like an undertow beneath the surface in Fish Story, are missing from The Forgotten Space. The film implies that the sea has been entirely tamed and that the capitalist fantasy of an annihilated (or forgotten) ocean has now become a reality. For Sekula and Burch, all that remains (or that soon will remain) is the container and the various channels of infrastructure across which it moves. Although their investigation of capitalist mobilities may have recovered the significance of the long-forgotten ocean, the ocean they have found is merely a dead background for capitalism. This is an ocean that is hardly worth remembering.

As is implied by the title, The Forgotten Space is an exceptionally geographical film, and its focus on how the processes and technologies of capitalism are reconstructing spaces of connection while destroying spaces of everyday life makes it an invaluable tool for understanding the role of a simple steel box in reorienting the world economy. Yet space, and in particular spaces of movement, are depicted as one step removed from capitalism’s dialectical contradictions, in a manner reminiscent of some critical realists’ designation of space as ‘contingent’ to the ‘necessary’ structures of society (e.g. Saunders, 1985; Sayer, 1985). Thus, the references at the end of the film to hope and to the unexpected changes that may be brought about through opening the ‘Pandora’s box’ that is the shipping container ring a bit hollow. For all the film’s strengths—and there are many—more focused attention on the contradictions within the ocean and other spaces within which movement occurs is required before we can not only remember, but also envision a future for, the forgotten spaces of the world.

Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK.

References

Buchloh B 1995 Allan Sekula: photography between discourse and document. In: A Sekula (ed) Fish Story. Düsseldorf: Richter, pp 189-200.

Buchloh B 2011 Remarks at “Forgotten Spaces” Symposium, Cooper Union, New York, 15 May, online at http://vimeo.com/24394711.

Cowen D 2010 A geography of logistics: market authority and the security of supply chains. The Annals for the Association of American Geographers 100: 600-20.

Foucault M 1986 (1967) Of other spaces. Diacritics 16: 22-27.

Harvey D 2011 Remarks at “Forgotten Spaces” Symposium, Cooper Union, New York, 15 May, online at http://vimeo.com/24394711.

Marx K 1887(1867) Capital, Volume 1, 1^st English Edition Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Saunders P 1985 Space, the city and urban sociology. In: D Gregory and J Urry (eds) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, pp 67-89.

Sayer A0 1985 The difference that space makes. In: D Gregory and J Urry (eds) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, pp 49-66.

Sekula A 1995 Fish Story. Düsseldorf: Richter.

Steinberg P 2001 The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steinberg P 2013 Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions. Atlantic Studies 10: in press.

Story B 2012 Review: The Forgotten Space. Antipode 44: 1575-78.

Vertov D 1984 Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley: University of California Press.