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Making Logistical Worlds Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

8. Piraeus Port as a Machinic Assemblage: Labour, Precarity, and Struggles

Authors : Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Nelli Kambouri

Published in: Logistical Asia

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

This chapter employs the concept of the machinic assemblage, which denotes the entanglements of machines, humans, software, and discourses that produce relations of power, exercised through the logic of control. We analyze the operations in the container terminals of the Piraeus port as a social machine: human labour is entangled with the lives of containers and all the machinery that moves them around the terminal: cranes, trucks, and software platforms, which generate and control complex movements through algorithmic computations. We argue, from this perspective, that labour in the Piraeus container terminals is enabled through the everyday functioning of cybernetic organisms whose lives are ordered according to objectives of maximum efficiency and the minimization of idleness.

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previous chapter The Importance of Being Siliguri: Border Effect and the ‘Untimely’ City in North Bengal
next chapter Asia’s Era of Infrastructure and the Politics of Corridors: Decoding the Language of Logistical Governance
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Metadata
Title
Piraeus Port as a Machinic Assemblage: Labour, Precarity, and Struggles
Authors
Pavlos Hatzopoulos
Nelli Kambouri
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Book
Logistical Asia

Print ISBN: 978-981-10-8332-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-8333-4

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8333-4_8