The Aesthetics of the Global Value Chain : Container Shipping, Media Networks and the Problem of Visibility in the Global Sphere of Circulation

Abstract

Facilitated by containerization global value and supply chains have largely replaced the factory-in-one-place model of production prevalent from the industrial revolution up until the 1970s. But if there was an aesthetics of the factory, i.e. a generic way in which the visibility of the production process was organized in the interest of controlled transparency, operational efficiency and social legitimacy, is there a comparable aesthetics of the global value chain? Drawing on recent work in infrastructure and media studies, this contribution focuses on the social media, film and design work of Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, to analyze three different, but interconnected regimes of visibility in and of global value chains: critical, operative and representational.