German friend wrote me early in January 1991, just before the war in the Persian Gulf: “You should try to photograph over-determined ports, like Haifa and Basra.” Her insight, that some ports are fulcrums of history, the levers many, and the results unpredictable, was written in the abstract shorthand of an intellectual. But she shares the materialist curiosity of people who work in and between ports, such as the Danish sailors who discovered that Israel was secretly shipping American weapons to Iran in the 1980s. A crate breaks, spilling its contents. But that’s too easy an image of sudden disclosure, at once archaic and cinematic, given that sailors rarely see the thrice-packaged cargo they carry nowadays. A ship is mysteriously renamed. Someone crosschecks cargo manifests, notices a pattern in erratic offshore movements, and begins to construct a story, a suspicious sequence of events, where before there were only lists and voyages, a repetitive and routine industrial series.
Sailors and dockers are in a position to see the global patterns of intrigue hidden in the mundane details of commerce. Sometimes the evidence is in fact bizarrely close at hand: Weapons for the Iraqis in the forward hold. Weapons for the Iranians in the aft hold. Spanish dockers in Barcelona laugh at the irony of loading cargo with antagonistic destinations. For a moment the global supply network is comically localized, as pictorially condensed as a good political cartoon. Better to scuttle the ship at the dock. But limpet mines are tools of governments, not of workers.
At the very least, governments find it necessary to dispute the testimony of maritime workers. Ronald Reagan, the symbolic Archimedes of a new world of uninhibited capital flows, worried about the stories being told in 1986. The Great Anecdotalist presumably had a good ear for yarns: these “quite exciting” reports “attributed to Danish sailors” about shipload after shipload of weapons moving from the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat to the Iranian Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas were best countered with an almost royalist affirmation of presidential authority: “Well now you’re going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name.”1
This was not the first time that Reagan had worried about the maritime trades. As he launched his political career in the 1960s, Reagan recalled his experience as a conservative trade unionist in Hollywood in the late 1940s, and claimed that the secret Communist labor stategy at the time had been to bring the Hollywood unions under the control of the West Coast longshoremen. The longshoremen were led by Australian-born Harry Bridges, who, in Reagan’s words, had been “often accused but never convicted of Communist membership.” The future president concluded with a sly aside: “The only item which was unclear to me–then and now–was how longshoremen could make movies.”2
We know now that actors can make politics. The next question to be asked is this: How do governments–and the actors who speak for governments–move cargo? How do they do it without stories being told by those who do the work? Could the desire for the fully automated movement of goods also be a desire for silence, for the tyranny of a single anecdote?
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
19Welder working on a fast combat support ship for the U.S. Navy. National Steel and Shipbuilding Company. San Diego, California. August 1990.
20U.S. Army VIIth Corps en route from Stuttgart to the Persian Gulf. Prins Johan Frisohaven. Rotterdam, the Netherlands. December 1990.
21Foundry in the former Lenin Shipyard. Gdańsk, Poland. November 1990.
22Welders working in a privatized section of the former Lenin Shipyard. Gdańsk, Poland. November 1990.
23Palace of Culture and Science. Warsaw, Poland. November 1990.
24Unemployment office. Gdańsk, Poland. November 1990.
25Lottery determining equitable distribution of work.
“La Coordinadora” dockers’ union dispatch hall. Barcelona, Spain. November 1990.
26Man salvaging bricks from a demolished waterfront warehouse.
Rijnhaven. Rotterdam, the Netherlands. September 1992.
DISMAL SCIENCE: PART 1
RED PASSENGER
When Friedrich Engels set out in 1844 to describe in detail the living and working conditions of the English working class, he began oddly enough by standing on the deck of a ship:
I know of nothing more imposing than the view one obtains of the river when sailing from the sea up to London Bridge. Especially above Woolwich the houses and docks are packed tightly together on both banks of the river. The further one goes up the river the thicker becomes the concentration of ships lying at anchor, so that eventually only a narrow shipping lane is left free in mid-stream. Here hundreds of steamships dart rapidly to and fro. All this is so magnificent and impressive that one is lost in admiration. The traveler has good reason to marvel at England’s greatness even before he steps on English soil. It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering that has made all this possible.1
For Engels, the increasing congestion of the Thames anticipated a narrative movement into the narrow alleys of the London slums. Very quickly, the maritime view–panoramic, expansive, and optimistic–led to an urban scene reduced to a claustrophobic Hobbesian war of all against all:
The more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs.… Here indeed human society has been split into its component atoms.2
Engels’ descriptive movement from the open space of the river to the closed spaces of the city’s main streets and slums also anticipated an incipient theoretical insight of historical materialism: the discovery of the unequal development of the technical means and the social relations of production. The river port, like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, is a huge figure of contained and purposeful energy, contrasting with the aggressive and brutish frictions of the city itself. The city, at this juncture, is more primitive than the river.
If the river and the city did not entirely exist in the same present, it is also the case that the river belonged to an earlier epoch. Thus the geographical passage from river to city was on a more subtle level a historical shift from one motive
