When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the
production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

Download a PDF of the Transit Labour Digest #2 here:
transit_labour-digest_2-web.pdf (2.8 MB)

From Flows of Culture to the Circuits of Logistics: Borders, Regions, Labour in Transit

Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle

When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

As the private sector has come to discover the potential wealth in commodities that produce and extend attention, mood, communication, social relations and opinion, the one commodity key to this production, commodity-labour, has increasingly yielded its secrets to that sector. Not only has this commodity-labour been trained in the university to do so, to be research active, in the most degraded sense of research as the mining of oneself and others for instrumental purposes, as in the research assessment exercise in the UK, but the university has experimented not just with the production but also the management of such subjectivities. Those experiments form the basis of the structure of today’s private knowledge management firms. Marketing firms, software firms, media firms, creative industries firms resemble nothing so much in the way they operate today as university departments, full of peer review, mentoring, collaboration, experiment and crucially the bringing of all life into work, so familiar to the academic like no else except perhaps the artist, as Andrew Ross has well noted in his revealing book No Collar.

Justin O'Connor and Gu Xin

The title of this text comes from Jon Solomon’s reworking of Patti Smith’s opening lines in Gloria. The resonance with ‘somebody else’s sins’ and the almost satanic rejection of a dominant discourse were just perfect at a time when the whole world seems enamored of Shanghai’s glamorous modernity. Patti Smith also takes us back to an ur-scene of contemporary urban regeneration – the transformation of 1970s Lower Manhattan from economic basket case and anarchic playground to the neo-bohemian property boom charted by Sharon Zukin in Loft Living.