In his landmark exploration of capitalist realism, Mark Fisher notoriously took as his Ansatzpunkt, or rather as his proposition, that in our time, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, jumping off from that point to show how, in various inventive ways and across different media, we might overcome this debilitating enervation of our imaginative faculties.1 However, the most striking thing about capitalist realism today may have less to do with our inability to imagine alternatives to the world system than with our difficulty in imagining the system itself. Capitalism has become simply a “given,” and as such, what contemporary capitalism is and how it operates is often invisible, perhaps even unthinkable, to most people who inhabit its bounded totality. Only in moments of crisis—and even then, not always or for very long—can certain aspects of the world system at large be limned in meaningful ways. Just as a “fish out of water is the only fish who has an inkling of water,” as J.R.R. Tolkien once put it2, we are only reminded of our situatedness within the vast system at times of apparent malfunction or disruption, thus disclosing the degree to which the normal is profoundly artificial and contingent.
One of those rare, fleeting moments occurred on March 23, 2021, when the massive container ship Ever Given became stuck sideways in the Suez Canal, blocking all other transit through one of the global economic system’s busiest channels for six days and forcing untold numbers of other ships to take the longer, more dangerous, and far more expensive maritime pathways around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and into the vicinity of the Southern Ocean, among other routes. The Ever Given, which is now back in service after the infamous ordeal, is 400 meters long, with a gross tonnage of 220,940 (nearly a half-billion pounds), and its container capacity is listed at 20,124 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units), which means that one shipload would need over ten thousand tractor-trailers to deliver that cargo via the highways. The temporary, accidental blockade of one of the key nodes within the complex circuits of transnational commerce had profound ramifications for the global economy. According to Lloyd’s of London, for example, the blockage cost world trade about $9.6 billion in cargo a day or almost $7 million every minute. But perhaps more astonishing is how this event temporarily revealed the significance of the pervasive and mostly invisible system of transoceanic shipping.
The first thing that struck me about this story, though admittedly not the most meaningful element, was the bizarre name of the ship. The Ever Given was christened according to a taxonomic custom of the Evergreen Marine Corporation, which is part of an even larger conglomerate: the Evergreen Group. Among its many fleets of container ships, Evergreen has a “G-Class” whose ships all have names like Ever Golden, Ever Genius, Ever Globe, and Ever Govern. There is also a line of “F-Class” ships named Ever Faith, Ever Forward, Ever Frank, Ever Future, etc.; an “S-Class” with Ever Shine, Ever Smile, Ever Strong, and Ever Safety; and so on. The moniker Ever Given is thus created as a corporate shorthand, with registration creating the need to give a distinct name to an individual ship, to make the name fit the ship category, and to include the trademark “Ever” label. Evergreen’s fleet includes at least 340 of these ships, with nearly 200 at sea at any given time, but there are apparently more than 5,000 other container ships operating in the world at any given moment.
This reality is part of our given, the facts of life today that are always there and always impinging on our senses and sensibilities whether we recognize it or not. The cartography of the world system, which is on a “global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale” (as Jameson put it3), would need to address what is “ever given” in the phenomenological sense: the evidence of our senses, the stuff we see and that we even take for granted, which is to say that we take these things as given. And yet, the system too is vast to be represented, virtually impossible to map, even granting the speculative, figural nature of maps and mapping. It is not so much that the present world system is simply too large to represent accurately—even if some of the most salient images of the Ever Given incident came from photographs literally taken from outer space (i.e., the International Space Station)—but rather that the system’s extensiveness, its complexity, and its dynamism render the system difficult to conceptualize. Moreover, with the fundamental obscuring of social relations inherent in the capitalist mode of production, as in Marx’s classic analysis of reification and the fetishism of the commodity, the elements within the ever-given yet protean world system are not always clearly identifiable either. The relative invisibility of thousands of container ships at sea merely gestures toward a more absolute invisibility of labor and production in most of everyday life.
In some respects, everyone intuitively knows how interconnected the various local, national, and regional economies are in our world today, but apart from those who are actively involved in the day-to-day operations of these processes—actual sailors and longshoreman, for instance, as well as the millions of people working in shipping and related industries but may not be situated aboard ships or in the ports themselves—few people likely know just how those connections are maintained. The worldwide system, so complex and international as to be almost unimaginable in practical terms, is an essential feature of the global economy and thus of the existential reality of our world. Part of the logic of capitalism, which is perhaps even more pronounced in the late capitalism associated with multinational production or globalization, involves the sense that strictly social activity is somehow transformed into an almost natural one, which in turn becomes taken for granted as simply “the way things are.” We thus move ineluctably from the scarcely visible to the invisible as the system is quite literally “ever given.” Such an invisibility is not only the ideology of late capitalism, but very much the way it operates. What is truly real in the capitalist mode of production is, in fact, hidden from view in this formulation, hence lending Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism additional nuances. Bourgeois economists, especially those touting the existence and efficacy of the so-called free market, treat these complex forces as if they were simply natural phenomena, like the law of gravity or the unpredictability of the weather. Even in a more quotidian sense, however, we know that much of the system itself remains invisible to most of the people caught up in it. By the twenty-first century, that means nearly everyone on the planet is unaware of the system. The occlusions of the material elements at play in this global system undoubtedly contribute to our increasing difficulty in imagining alternatives, perhaps even generally contributing to a greater enervation of the imagination, since the given seems ever more inevitable, irreversible, and permanent.
To return to the Ever Given, we might mention the astonishing complexity of the ship’s very being in the world, that is, as an object to be known in its own context. Even in the melodramatic spectacle of its moment of fame, the “stuck boat” narrative kept much hidden. Most unseen of these elements were perhaps the very people whose lives and labor are given over to this industry. Observing the “effacement of labor” in depictions of the Ever Given incident, for example, Charmaine Chua wrote in “The Monstrosity of Maritime Capital”:
As the whole world looked on, aerial photographs and wide-lens panoramas struggled to capture the ship’s scale in a single frame. Humans, even other machines, barely register alongside it. Stacked with 18,000 containers and millions of dollars of goods, stretching more than 1,312 feet from end to end, the ship is twice as long as the Suez Canal is wide in the narrow passage where it ran aground. Its geopolitical proportions are equally mindboggling: Japanese-owned, German-managed, and Taiwanese-operated, it is registered in Panama and captained by a crew of Indian seamen.4
The sheer size of such ships is mystifying—Chua calls it “the industrial sublime”—and the numbers of these vessels, not to mention supertankers and other such naval behemoths operating at all times across the oceans, can be hard to comprehend. Add to this expanse the bizarre permutations of a multinational system, its various regimes of regulation, and its international workforce, not to mention the transnationality of all commerce, and it soon becomes well nigh impossible to map this system in any meaningful way. States are involved, as is so much of the “Global South,” yet the world of the Ever Given troubles and exceeds all boundaries in its global networks, thus consigning traditional frames of reference to the dustbins of a history that is itself increasingly difficult to grasp.
In his back-cover endorsement of Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s Cartographies of the Absolute, Jameson poses this question: “How much of capitalism can we see from the moon?”5 This question might seem silly at first, but it is a fairly direct way of getting at the problem of representation of an oceanic world system. Toscano and Kinkle’s book is very much about artistic practice and the exigencies of producing art in the twenty-first century, and, at the same time, it is devoted to ways of seeing, to employ John Berger’s still relevant phrase. How does one depict spaces in a way that is both accurate and useful to the map-reader? Because Toscano and Kinkle are looking at not only the topography, but the social, political, economic, and cultural spaces as well, the crisis of representation at the heart of the project is magnified.
As in Fisher’s concern for a capitalist realism that permits little in the way of imagined alternatives to the present state of things, Toscano and Kinkle take seriously the crisis of representation associated with the contemporary world system, which ultimately contributes to Marx’s overall critique of the increasingly global political economy, beginning with his exposition of the hidden character of the commodity in Capital and advancing from there to a mapping of the world system as a whole. As Jameson conceded in the conclusion to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “‘Cognitive mapping’ was in reality nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness’,” albeit “class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind.”6 To some extent, this “mapping” and “consciousness” in an era of capitalist realism will need to recover the ability to see and figure forth those workers, the effaced labor, and the broader network of social relations that make this system possible. For example, the sailors aboard the Ever Given, the Egyptian or otherwise identified laborers struggling to get the ship unstuck, or the workers in the Port of Qingdao who repaired and outfitted the ship several months later, or the many thousands also unseen but essential to the very existence of our world as we think we know it: These people must, too, be “mapped” if we are truly to imagine the system as it is, much less any desirable alternatives.
In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville delineated the “man-killing” labor performed by “the meanest mariners, renegades, and castaways” (or, in other words, common sailors, whalers, deck-hands, and so on) in a literary cartographic attempt to make cognizable that everlasting terra incognita: the system of global capitalism itself. Famously, Melville observes that “Men may seem detestable as joint-stock companies and nations,” but there is a profound, “august dignity” that can be seen “shining in the arm that wields the pick or drives a spike,” the “workingman’s arm.”7 So much of the global imaginary functions to hide such people, as if we could do without them entirely, which is the techno-utopian dream of many who praise automation for its own sake, thus attempting to render workers not only invisible, but ultimately nonexistent. It remains for art, such as that available through literature and criticism, to map these spaces of the transoceanic world system and to register the real work of those who labor in it and who make our ever given reality possible.
In dystopian fiction, we are invited to contemplate the loss of a livable future as post-apocalyptic scenarios are explored through narrative and visual arts, but it may be that we need to develop a keener sense of what is lost in our own present when we cannot see the very people who make our lives and our standards of present living possible. The ocean is an apt figure for the fundamental unrepresentability of a vast, complicated, and oscillatory world system, but it is also a real space in which the existential conditions of our daily lives are determined. Sailors like those working on and around the Ever Given play a major role in all this, of course, but the vocation of art—criticism, too—in our time will be to help us make sense of that system and our place within it. Paying attention to that which is “ever given,” such as the weird story figured forth by the drama of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal, we discern aspects of the crisis that is the world system, and, perhaps, there we can find potential resources for imagining alternatives.
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Endnotes
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2008); on the “enervated imagination,” see my For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2022).
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 64.
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 54.
- Charmaine Chua, “The Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism,” Boston Review (May 4, 2021): https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-ever-given-and-the-monstrosity-of-maritime-capitalism/.
- See Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), back cover.
- Jameson, Postmodernism, 417–418.
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale (New York: Penguin, 1992), 126. See also my Melville, Mapping, and Globalization (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).
Robert Tally