LOGISTICS AS RATIONALITY: EXCAVATING THE COLONIALITY OF CONTEMPORARY LOGISTICAL FORMATIONS Megan Archer A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Brighton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2020 1 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the material and epistemic frameworks of logistics, through identifying and interrogating both the specific logics and the broader rationality that underpins logistical organisation. It writes a longer history of logistics, linking the production of Western modernity to contemporary logistical formations. The thesis argues that logistical rationality has its foundations in, and continues the project of, colonial modernity, by unpicking the epistemic framework and the representational order it is founded on. It identifies a set of logics that animate world-making logistical operations, namely representation, measurement, extraction, translation, prediction, standardisation and the control of uncertainty. I argue that logistical rationality attempts to incorporate the entire world into its own form of legibility – and in so doing, erases that which cannot be translated as such. It translates the world and its populations into what I call logistical legibility by extracting, translating and manufacturing knowledge about them in the form of data, in order that said knowledge may be used to predict the future and hence, control its radical uncertainty. This also amounts to a delimitation of what counts as knowledge, and as ways of being and doing in the world, and as such provides the grounds and means for the increasing administration of subjects. The framework I develop here thus allows us to reckon with those forms of violence, structural, physical, and epistemic, that lay the groundwork for current processes of domination and the shape of contemporary colonial modernity. Ultimately, this thesis contends that logistical rationality, through these logics, has come to be infrastructural to the organisation of politics, economics, industry, and further, people’s lifeworlds. 2 CONTENTS Logistics as rationality: Excavating the coloniality of contemporary logistical formations ................... 1 Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 2 Declaration ............................................................................................................................................. 6 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ 7 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 8 Main Arguments & Approach ........................................................................................................ 9 Specific logics ............................................................................................................................... 10 Logistical Rationality .................................................................................................................... 12 Logistics, Totality and Truth Narratives ........................................................................................ 14 Subjectivity ................................................................................................................................... 18 Structure....................................................................................................................................... 21 One: The (counter)revolution in Logistics: Cybernetics, systems and logistical rationality ................. 24 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 24 Section One: Cybernetics ................................................................................................................. 26 Entropy, Chaos, Order .................................................................................................................. 27 Science of Sciences – Universal, Unified Theory of Everything .................................................... 30 Coloniality of Cybernetics: Bateson, Mead and Mitchell ............................................................. 31 Section Two: Operations Research, Systems Analysis, Physical Distribution Management ............ 35 Operations Research .................................................................................................................... 35 Systems Analysis .......................................................................................................................... 38 Physical Distribution Management .............................................................................................. 40 Section Three: Institutions, Actors, Economics ................................................................................ 45 Industrial Dynamics ...................................................................................................................... 47 The RAND Corporation ................................................................................................................. 50 US Department of Defense: The Planning, Programme and Budgeting System .......................... 53 Cowles Commission and Econometrics ........................................................................................ 54 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 58 Two: Applied anthropology, extraction and the New World Order .................................................... 60 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 60 Section One: Counterinsurgency and the end of Empires ............................................................... 62 The CIA on Colonial Empires ........................................................................................................ 62 Section Two: Modernisation and Cold War Social Science .............................................................. 66 3 Cold War Anthropology and Social Science ................................................................................. 66 Extraction and Translation ........................................................................................................... 70 Section Three: The Social as System and Insurgency Prophylaxis ................................................... 72 RANDthropology .......................................................................................................................... 72 Project Camelot ............................................................................................................................ 76 POLITICA ....................................................................................................................................... 79 The Hamlet Evaluation System .................................................................................................... 83 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 85 Three: Extraction, Development, and Global Architectures of Indebtedness ..................................... 87 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 87 Section One: The Marshall Plan and Economic Development ......................................................... 89 The Marshall Plan ......................................................................................................................... 89 Development ................................................................................................................................ 93 IRBD mission to Colombia ............................................................................................................ 95 Debt as extraction ........................................................................................................................ 98 Section Two: Credit Ratings, Riskiness and Metrics ....................................................................... 100 A brief history of credit ratings .................................................................................................. 101 Sovereign ratings ........................................................................................................................ 104 Metrics ....................................................................................................................................... 108 Section Three: The ECA-Paris Club-IMF Assemblage ..................................................................... 110 Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) .................................................................................................... 110 The Paris Club ............................................................................................................................. 112 Debt rescheduling & the IMF ..................................................................................................... 114 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................