<nettime> Foreign Trade Zone - A People's Consultancy

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Hello everyone -

Here's a report from recent activities in Chicago:

Since April 25, Rozalinda Borcila and I have been developing a research 
device called "Foreign Trade Zone: A People's Consultancy," in the 
metropolitan region of Chicago. It consists of a map room in ThreeWalls 
Gallery, a program of workshops and learning walks, and an extensive 
website designed to last beyond the month-long gallery show:
http://southwestcorridornorthwestpassage.org

The project grew out of a shared interest in Chicago's ballooning 
logistics industry, the people who work for it, and its crucial but 
often forgotten role in constituting the daily life of neoliberal 
society. It also grew out of a shared desire to develop a more capacious 
and useful kind of cultural practice, not subordinated to the 
imperatives of the specialized art circuit, but instead, able to engage 
with global issues and also with local communities directly affected by 
them. The title, "Foreign Trade Zone," refers to a legal device dating 
back to the 1930s that treats designated areas, in or adjacent to ports, 
as foreign territory for customs purposes. Over time, "in or adjacent 
to" has come to mean with a sixty-mile radius or a ninety-minute drives 
from a grantor authority that may not be anywhere near water! FTZs bring 
the free trade of the open seas onto dry land, thereby contributing to 
the relentless dismantling of all laws that aim to safeguard social and 
ecological reproduction on a particular territory. We wanted to ask 
questions about this process, beyond the Foreign Trade Zones themselves, 
and to consult with whoever would get involved or care to answer. For 
that we needed our own device, not legal and entrepreneurial, but 
cultural and social.
To put this thing together we assembled the different kinds of research 
that each of us had been doing separately, myself into just-in-time 
production and distribution, Rozalinda into the FTZs and logistics 
districts of Chicagoland and the conditions of life for often 
undocumented warehouse workers. To better understand what we saw going 
on in our local area we extended our curiosity outward, to the railyards 
of Kansas City, to the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas served by the 
Kansas City Southern line, and to the interoceanic link of the Panama 
Canal (where Kansas City Southern also has a stake, it turns out). All 
that lays the groundwork for an ongoing project that's both analytic and 
perceptual, using the tools of cartography, documentary photography, 
interviews and direct experience along with open-source intelligence and 
academic research. It shows that distribution is not just incidental to 
the hard facts of production, as some dogmatic Marxist still insist. 
Instead, distribution sets many of the conditions for contemporary 
production, through the processes of distancing, standardization, 
anonymization and acceleration that are characteristic of container 
transport. In the context of global so-called "recovery" and fresh 
redeployment of capital, this research constitutes a prolongation of the 
inquiries carried out with the Technopolitics group (particularly Armin 
Medosch) and in the collaborative seminar "Three Crises: 30s-70s-Today," 
held at Mess Hall in Chicago in Fall 2011, of which Rozalinda was a 
co-organizer.
The long-term work in Chicago, however, has let us go much more deeply 
into our subject than any professional speciality, whether or artistic 
or academic, would normally allow. What we've really been exploring are 
the colonial framings and historical transformations of an industrial 
development corridor that grew up around an indigenous portage route and 
a settler transportation project (the Illinois & Michigan Canal, 
completed in 1848). This route, which we call the Southwest Corridor, 
was initially marked off as a safe passage zone for early American fur 
traders by the Indian Boundary Lines traced in 1818-19, as a result of 
the Treaty of St. Louis that was forced militarily on the Ottawa, Ojibwe 
and Potawatomi peoples. The canal project was then funded by a federal 
land grant that set off the first surveyors' campaigns in the area, 
providing the property for a speculative boom after Indian removal in 
1832. The route has subsequently been overlaid by railroads, another 
canal, a superhighway and an airport, while at the same time aggregating 
major industries, refineries and power plants around its transportation 
networks. Its existence also underwrites the city's emergence as a 
global financial center: the Chicago Board of Trade was founded in 1847 
in anticipation of the grain that would be brought to this Great Lakes 
port city by the canal.
The notion of path dependency, borrowed from economic history, has 
helped us to understand this whole process of aggregation, where each 
preceeding phase of development tends to condition, channel, guide and 
limit the successive phases. Path dependency doesn't just mean that 
"stuff goes where stuff is." It means that the historical conditions 
under which technologies and organizational forms emerge will continue 
to exert an often decisive influence on their development going forward, 
even after fairly radical breaks like the shift from canal to railroad 
to highway. Such shifts are additive, with lots of carry-over, in terms 
of culture as well as technology. So it turns out that we're all more or 
less patho-dependent: on colonialism, on large-scale agriculture, on 
industry, on finance, and on the relentless logistical drive to organize 
transport and distribution for both commercial and political 
expansionism. You really get it when you study the Southwest Corridor.
Yet there was a world here before Chicago, before the canals and 
railroads, before the flow of the local rivers was reversed to carry 
both sewage and industrial waste away from the drinking water of Lake 
Michigan. And the interesting thing about a path is its difference from 
a rational concept, a dialectical logic, or any other sort of finalizing 
representation. A path unfolds in space as well as time, so you can 
always walk it again, from either end and in whatever direction, asking 
questions as you go, meeting the people that inhabit that pathway, 
sensing its distant pasts and its incipient transformations, picking 
through its ruins and imagining its futures. A path is a means to an 
end, but it's also a set of abandoned destinations, possible 
bifurcations and potentials still open on the ground, where everything 
about the ways things are can be reiterated and replayed. A pathway is 
exactly the place where you can experience the map becoming the 
territory again.
To make this pathfinding experience into a social activity we sent out 
open calls for a number of learning walks, which are documented under 
the "events" tab of the website. Each time, a group comes together, 
sharing feelings, observations and knowledge as the walk unfolds. A walk 
is an experiment in perception, multiplied by interaction, conversation 
and the circulation of trans-generational memories. While actually 
moving through the land whose historical changes we've tried to map out 
and represent in the gallery and on the website, we often used the 
appearance or re-emergence of wetlands as a cue to the presence of 
worlds before Chicago and forces of nature that resist total 
instrumentalization. We called attention to the site of the former 
Continental Divide, where water once hesitated before running either 
toward the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, or the Mississippi and 
the Gulf of Mexico. And we asked about all the other divides called up 
by the inscription of the Southwest Corridor on the land over these last 
two centuries of industrialization. The response has been really 
enthusiastic. People want to engage with these kinds of questions.
Some of the most intense moments of the walks came, for me anyway, in 
the Calumet Basin far south of Chicago's downtown Loop, where the steel 
industry emerged in the late nineteenth century to build  ships, 
locomotives, skycrapers and perhaps most importantly of all, the rails 
of the entire western train network. What we found in the South Chicago 
neighborhoods were huge piles of a toxic substance called petcoke, which 
is brought by railway and barge to urban staging grounds where it is 
readied for export, since it's considered too dirty to burn in the US. 
Petcoke is a new industrial threat to people living the Calumet Basin. 
It is produced by all oil refineries, but especially by our local big 
three: Exxon, Citgo and BP, all located on the Southwest Corridor. The 
reason for the sudden surge in petcoke production is that all three of 
those sites rank high among the top ten US refineries processing 
carbon-heavy tar sands crude, which is slurried in here via pipelines 
that leak and trains that catch fire and explode. Our cultural activity 
became political activism, as it should, when we rerouted one of our 
walks to join a protest against BP in the East Chicago, just across the 
Indiana state line, where environmental regulations are even laxer than 
in Illinois and it's even more profitable to pollute the lake, 
impregnate the ground with oil and generally burn up the planet.
Here's the thing: the pathways we've been walking are clearly those of 
the Anthropocene, or as Peter Linebaugh prefers to say, the 
Capitalocene, since the last two centuries of industrial capitalism are 
clearly behind the the capacity of human beings to wreak havoc with the 
Earth's ecology and reshape its very landforms. You can see that power 
at work in South Chicago, where today's Arcelor-Mittal complex sits on 
top of a gigantic rationalized peninsula jutting out into the lake, 
built entirely from slag and traversed by a canal that ranks as one of 
the most polluted waterways in the country. Capitalism may develop in 
stages (Fordist, neoliberal, etc) but the industrial development 
corridor that built Chicago has a continuous history that's still 
unfolding today, up to a point that has become uniquely threatening. 
We've been walking this pathway for two hundred years, but at the same 
time, as John Jordan insists, "we have never been here before." We've 
never had to deal as a species with the consequences of the path that 
we've been walking. How to replay this story? How to open up more 
beneficial conversations about so-called "development" at local, 
national, continental and global scales? How to actually change the 
gears of industry? In short, what kind of politics, activism and/or 
"cultural activity" is adequate for the Anthropocene?
We don't have the answers and we obviously can't find them alone. Our 
month-long "show" is over on May 31. But we are still asking the 
questions - and hoping to cross paths with many others who are doing 
something similar.

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