This piece was originally published in the digital programme of the Royal Opera House’s production ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’.
http://www.roh.org.uk/articles/mahagonny-digital-programme-containers-contained
The largest cargo ship you can think of can carry 15,000 containers, it can hold 746 million bananas – one for every European. Quiet containers, packed tightly, the neural network of our everyday goods. Teabags, toilet paper, toothpaste; fuel furniture frisbees… We can spin, wheeling, in any direction, but the bigger it gets the smaller the space for it in our minds. All that is solid melts into air and modernity is liquefied. It is that great promise of globalisation – everything shifting speedily through time, space, onto our plates. But in fact, these beastly ships move slowly, snail-like, trudging thickly across ocean and sea.
Shipping containers are so cheap to manufacture that it is often more economical to leave them at their destination than to return or re-use them for the same function. We are left with withering wastelands of abandoned drums, strained by their own lack of percussion. Fortunately, shipping containers are now trendy. Box-Parks, Container Cities, Containervilles: shiny licks of paint glossing over their wet, previous journeys. These mostly house “pop-up stores”, which are “edgy” “funky” “quirky”. It is the neoliberal logic of transience: quickening the space of commodity. Something that is “open for a very short time” seems to work better than something that just “continues to remain open”. A shipping container mall sits casually on part of the demolished Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, formerly of 1,200 council homes. Shop, instead, where you used to live, work and play.
People, too, in containers. ‘Tilbury Docks: Man dies after 35 found in container’. People, too, as commodity. Containeristan, Pakistan, a satirical name, for a country made up of containers. Clumsy colourful boxes strewn across cities; used both as pedestal from which to arouse citizen unrest as well as roadblocks with which to contain them. Portable borders. Bullet-proofed containers, air-conditioned and with bathrooms, are marshalled from city to city; movable bunkers for politicians in times of protest (some even cost up to £74,000). Hundreds of containers inelegantly appropriated to control demonstrations in place of the police, to cordon off areas, neighbourhoods, identities. Filled up with sand, these containers are soon abandoned and autonomous; a geography critically aware of the dangers of communal absurdity and yet powerless to its cohesive force. From slowing down traffic to becoming a podium of political dissent, the container transforms, and Pakistani identity remains leaky and unstable. A miscarried modernity, some new kind of order.
Cities all over the world are now virtual, virtually neural, a bundle of meanings and impulses that interconnect. There is no totality, just these hollow cavities in between the debris: but what of the container? This object has become a defiant one, a geometry scrambled to suit a spectrum of needs, both political and arbitrary. Gentrification, forced migration, political manoeuvre naive of cause or effect display the repurposed shipping container as an infrastructure of dispossession, of informality. A new plasticity.
‘Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’ and the stage is set with shipping containers. This Brechtian dialogue is not romantic, it is an architecture of simplicity. Thieves and whores lost in the desert. Hysterical bodies in a hyper-geography. Building, box by box, a new Jerusalem. Capitalism exposed as anarchy. Society, isolated, reels toward invisibility. Synchronous time, and space. Our crises here are quick curving hurricanes and cocked pistols. Reality is not translated into metaphor but grasped simultaneously…
because the thing is, Mahagonny is everywhere.
