ICS Seminar Series

Abstract Logistics, the art and science of getting goods, services, and information to the right place at the right time to maximise profit, has profoundly altered contemporary life in the global north. Logistics usually scale businesses up; but it also scales down, to the lives of individuals, in scheduling events, planning projects, and organising lives. This talk examines the emergent discourse of “personal logistics” across management science, psychology, self-help, and design aesthetics. It shows how terms used in the logistics of global trade, such as resilience, fulfilment, agility, and flow, also create political subjectivities within neoliberalism’s new economies. Guided by mobile apps, workers and consumers are increasingly tasked with managing their own workflow, rebounding from setbacks, shopping broadly and efficiently, and circulating their names and images continuously. How is personal logistics already imagined to create new senses of self and social relations? Biography Susan Zieger (B.A., Dartmouth College, MSc., London Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and specializes in nineteenth-century British and related literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on the novel, ephemera, and other mass media forms. She has written Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) and The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2018). Zieger is currently researching Logistical Life, a reinterpretation of modernity from the point of view of efficient mobility and circulation. In winter and spring 2019, she held a visiting fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to support this project. In fall 2019, she will be a visiting professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, in the Digital Life Research Group. With Nicole Starosielski and Matt Hockenberry, she is editing the volume Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, forthcoming from Duke University Press.