ABSTRACT
The main focus of this chapter derives from research carried out at Sydney's Port Botany and within its hinterland networks of rail and road transport. Today container transport is monitored and controlled by software programs that track and coordinate the mobility of these metal boxes according to logics of mathematical optimization. The interest here is in the encumbrance introduced by the empty container's bulk and how it provides a baseline against which logistical visions of leanness and agility must be measured. The results of these operations can be implicated in systems of meaning or signification. However, to understand how logistics organizes social relations and is in turn organized by them we need an approach that can come to terms both with the computational code that drives such operations and the lived material realities of labour and production necessary for their execution.
