Matthew Hockenberry is a Lecturer in Digital Technology and Emerging Media at Fordham University. A media historian and theorist whose work examines the media of global production, his current project develops a media history of logistics, exploring critical developments in the epistemology of assembly by tracing how media forms shaped the emergence of logistical production and distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is particularly concerned with transitional moments of mediation in the histories of paperwork, telecommunication, and computation.
Authors | Matthew Hockenberry
Articles on Amodern by Matthew Hockenberry
TECHNIQUES OF ASSEMBLY
Logistical Media and the (Supply) Chaîne Opératoire
This article examines the techniques that constitute logistical operation, suggesting the application of the chaîne opératoire to the abstract structure of the supply chain. Building on a German media theoretical approach to “cultural techniques" and the idea of “logistical media,” it argues for assembly as an ur-mediative technique, one produced both before and beside attendant mediative functions of storage and transmission. Long before its instantiation in contemporary logistical systems, assembly emerged as a cultural technique in the ancient storehouse. In time, the abstract forms of mediation it produced made sites accessible as a virtual assembly—a development of critical importance to the instrumental operations of the global supply chain.