Following the (unfollowable) thing: methodological considerations in the era of high globalisation

The introduction to my recent book On the Commodity Trail (2015), considers an assortment of pound/dollar store products whose journeys across the globe I categorise as being less ‘followable’ than the kinds of commodity tracked by previous thing-followers: Sidney Mintz’s classic study of sugar, and more recently Ian Cook and Michelle Harrison on papayas, Pietra Rivoli on T-shirts, and Caroline Knowles on flip-flops. ¹ My own thing-following revolved around eight products chosen from pound/dollar stores, and their journeys from waste material on Chinese rubbish dumps, to factories along the Yangtze river delta, to the commodities city of Yiwu, to the ports of Shanghai, Felixstowe, Rotterdam, LA, and finally to the stores and then the homes of consumers. Yet, despite the obvious common nature of our projects, the commodities I was following seemed to be part of commodity chains that did not display the same classic followability as my fellow thing-followers. The more I followed them, the more I found that the chains, just like the objects they produced, were somehow mutable and disposable. For example, while many of the key places along the chains were very established and historically ensconced in the chain (e.g. container ports, shipping routes, freight train lines), others seemed to be in constant flux. Areas of certain cities suddenly and quickly became collection and sorting areas for raw materials; waste peddlers trading in them returned to rural provinces; factory owners switched production and many went in and out of business, containers fell from ships; bargain store owners changed suppliers, new bargain stores cropped up; and consumers shopped tactically in unpredictable ways. The trajectory of the commodities I was following was a fretful journey in which breakages occurred, repositionings were forced, and collateral damage was integral. The chain was symptomatic of a fragmented and constantly shifting just-in-time globalised economy; its ‘flow’ made up of numerous micro psycho-social, geographical and economic ruptures, and its form of globalisation far from the slowly spreading homogenous ink stain that ‘flat world-ers’ ² would have us believe.

This issue of followability and its methodological implications can usefully be traced back to a series of articles by Ian Cook et al. ³ (of which I was part) entitled ‘Geographies of Food’ that appeared between 2006 and 2011. In particular, the first of these – ‘Following’ – acknowledged the thing-following method, drawing on insights from key contributions by Arjun Appadurai, David Harvey and George Marcus. ⁴ The combination of these three texts, had influenced many ‘thing-followers’, including myself, and was instrumental in creating a method that strived to follow things in order to explore their social lives and/or ‘tear aside the veil’ (to use Marx’s language) to reveal the fetish. It is Marcus’ article though, that I found most useful in thinking about what we can gain from following things that do not lend themselves to being followed, and indeed, what our agenda should be.

For Marcus multi-sited research arose in response to ‘empirical changes in the world’ that ‘transformed the locations of cultural production’, ⁵ thus implicating globalisation as a process that has led to cultural geographers inevitably engaging in multi-sited fieldwork. I want to add to this the extent to which globalisation is now embedded in cultural processes and therefore everyday life, and the implications this has for thing-following. Globalisation has come of age; it is no longer novel, and neither is discovering that objects come from across the global via the hands of many unseen others. This, in itself, is no longer enough. When Harvey first wrote what is now a heavily cited and widely read article, it was still relatively novel to uncover in detail where a product came from. It made sense to trace commodities with accuracy to their makers and distributors, and so on in order to actually hold people accountable, to make processes and inequalities visible and by doing so defetishise. The sheer global nature of commodity chains was still awe-inspiring in many ways, and uncovering it could indeed serve to topple a fetish or two. Even a decade or so ago, the story of certain products journeys, told by the right person could shock enough to (arguably) defetishise. I am thinking, for example, of singer-songwriter, TV presenter Jamelia’s quest to find the source of her hair extensions. But globalised commodity chains no longer have the shock of the new; discovering the sweatshop workers at the end of a chain, while of course valuable, is not surprising enough – not as horrifying as it should be, suggesting some level of de-sensitising. Such workers are perhaps part of the subaltern, but they can sometimes speak. ⁶ We have heard about their existence and sometimes their plight, albeit often through half-hearted corporate social responsibility projects, or ethical consumption initiatives that mean well, but are hard for low-earners to participate in. Truly invisible workers in a chain cannot speak, neither can containers that fall off ships, or manufacturing companies that suddenly do not exist.

It is the subaltern that is the other key point in Marcus’ article. He notes that doing multiple-sited research cross-cuts the local and the global, the ‘lifeworld’ and the ‘system’ and that ‘resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system’, and contrasts this to single-sited research that is contextualised by a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system. One of the concerns he recognises about this multi-sited ethnography is that it risks losing the perspective of the subaltern ⁷ as a result of not being contextualised by the grand structures at play. As Marcus points out, in order to recognise the position of the subaltern, we need to acknowledge the system that dominates them (p.101). I wonder whether the patchiness of coverage that can stem from following unfollowable things forces us to look at the gaps, the bits we cannot follow; the bits where the subaltern most definitely resides. Perhaps, following the thing through multiple sites to find the gaps (and more importantly any patterns and links uncovered by the gaps) brings the subaltern explicitly back into the methodology, because finding what might be called syndromes in gaps, brings the bigger systems ⁸ back into the picture. A syndrome in my own work, for example, was the pathway of internal Chinese migrants, typically from the rural to the urban (into which they disappear), brought about by the structures of a system that invests in the urban but disallows universal access to it.

The issue then is whether we can bring the systems back into view, without them needing to be the established systems of structural theory. This is a thorny and pernicious question, but I would like to offer up what I hope will not be viewed as a weak compromise. That is that studying a commodity chain, or indeed any linked sites that are part of a cultural process, is a study of a system itself. Whether we view this ‘system’ as part of a wider all-encompassing system is rather a question of our political, philosophical, and academic world view (Harvey, after all, likely realised that uncovering the fetish would involve following things through different sites, and this did not conflict with an avowedly Marxist worldview – far from it), but the subaltern within the chain can certainly be seen again if we treat the chain as a ‘system’ with its own gaps into which subaltern elements can and most often do, fall. In other words, awareness of the gaps in an object’s trajectory, in order to expose the ‘system’ at play (and more importantly in real terms the precarious livelihoods created by it), is perhaps an apposite way of writing the subaltern back in and going beyond the well-travelled trajectories of what might be called the era of high globalisation. Telling the story of why something becomes unfollowable, ought perhaps to be an equally valid methodological stance as accurately charting followable paths.

What does such an approach actually look like when applied to say, my own research inquiries? In many ways, this is a call to follow the collateral damage of capitalistic commodity chains; what happens when things fall apart, as it is precisely these fragmentations that enable the chain as a whole to be successful. Capitalism requires failure, collateral damage, aberration. Often these elements exist in the ‘slow’ parts of the chain, the older, clunkier mechanisms backing up the mouse-clicking efficiencies of speedy capitalism at the front of house. ⁹ In my case, that was the grinding rust of the container ports, with their spilled contents, breakages, illicit cargos (sometimes of people), industrial accidents, and an incessant nature that still breaks workers despite things having changed from previous eras. It was also the hand-to-mouth life of the waste peddlers dragging their heavily laden carts around China’s coastal cities, most of whom did not ‘exist’ in terms of having any rights or protection. In each of these situations ‘things’ were lost, changed, dropped, deemed worthless, and their presence in the chain was like a torch blinking on and off. Exposing gaps then, rather belies the fast capitalism of Ben Agger. ¹⁰ But this method does not aim to ‘study’ the gaps as it were (it is not simply a study even deeper ‘down’); rather, it hopes to analyse what the gaps bring to the operation of the entire chain. Or to put it a different way, who or what becomes disposable in calculations that too comfortably allow for collateral damage. Exposing the gaps sees some capitalistic chains as polarised trajectories where fast capitalism is engaged in a parasitic relationship with clunky capitalism. This would be the syndrome of the gaps explored in the pound/dollar store chain particular chain – a ‘system’ within a system.

The call to follow-the-thing created by the combination of Harvey, Marcus, and Appadurai in that earlier era of globalisation, could now in the era of high globalisation, perhaps be usefully added to by a call to better know the unfollowable thing – the gaps, the mechanisms of the chain that cause them, and the collateral damage they incur, in the name of capitalistic ‘success’. Rupture is so frequently now the norm, a ‘flow’ of micro-catastrophes at each part of the chain, that serve to make it stronger but polarise the lives of those along its trajectory. The questions to ask are: Why can’t we follow this thing? Where are the ruptures that stop us and what is behind them? What don’t we know about this commodity chain? What can’t we seem to find out and why? Where does the chain disappear to? Such questions may mean that messy methods ¹¹ needs to get still messier.