Fulfilment Center Innocence
Intimate Tales of Cybernetic Labor and Racial Desire at the Port of Rotterdam
Dutch girls love big, black dick!
It was nearly 3pm, and as usual I was late for my shift. I was walking so rashly to the ful”lment center, that I barely saw the grati on the metal plaque of the little wood opening. I was crossing. It read: “Dutch girls love big, black dick!”, followed by an illustrative drawing. Once inside the windowless architecture of the ful”lment center, I put on the industrial shoes, thermal jacket and gloves, and secured the scanner to my arm. As I walked towards the fridges, getting familiar with the loud cheesy music and the smell of fresh vegetables, I saw the director supervising a couple of brown workers who were placing a huge new bright red sign on the back wall of the°online supermarket’s chilled area: “Work Hard, Play Hard!”. The director, an extremely rich white Dutchman, had become even richer after the Covid-19 lockdowns. The sign was clearly meant to be read by all 400 warehouse workers, mostly brown bodies from Dutch Caribbean colonies, immigrants from Eastern Europe and from other peripheries of the world. As I witnessed this scene, I thought back to the “Dutch[mostly white] girls love big, black [playful] dick!”. Now I get it.
My Zionist ex-lover who tasted like strawberries
Watching him sleep next to her, still naked, she was desperate for him to wake up. There was something she was dying to ask. When he had texted her to have dinner the night before, it had really caught her by surprise. After all, she hadn’t seen or heard from him in seven years, since their brief but passionate aair had ended. Back then, she was a young Mexican immigrant who had just started working at the ful”lment center, and he, an extremely good looking Russian-Dutch security guard. After the dinner, a bar followed, then her place. Just as they had done seven years ago. As they were making out on her couch, with that same urgent passion as so many years ago, she had noticed something that made her laugh to herself, hoping he wouldn’t notice. All these years, she had thought his lips tasted like strawberries, but now she realized it was the sweet & sour sauce of the bacalao broodjes they had ordered to go just some hours ago at that Suriname’s place. Lol. When he “nally opened his eyes, he burrowed into the sheets and looked at her with that charming smile. She smiled back, and almost instantly asked: “Do you still believe Jewish people are smarter than the rest of the world?”. “Google it, it’s true”, he said.
The Robotic Hairy Cow
As the intense sunlight woke her up, she felt her body unusually warm and big, as if she were inside a massive bottarga. Her now hairy arms were well equipped, with the same scanner now an intrinsic part of them. Two of her four legs were not entirely hairy but metallic and long, wearing still the industrial boots. She recognized the grass she was in. It was next to the industrial boulevard where the ful”lment center was. She had now turned into one of the many hairy cow workers brought to the port of Rotterdam to cut the grass. Her job now was no longer to pick and !ll totes with groceries middle-class Rotterdammers had ordered online, but to keep the grass short. Eventually, the robotic hairy cow was given a promotion. She was transferred to a well-known park in Amsterdam-Zuid, where she joined another team of robotic hairy cows. Her primary job now was to prevent white gay Dutchmen from having sexual intercourse in the grass nearby.
{ glossary of desirefulfilment }
Notes for a glossary of desirefulfilment
1, 2 a desireful game, Mary Poppins, Vega de Santiago. In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You !nd the fun and... snap! The job’s a game / She felt good. She went faster. Obviously. How couldn’t she? They are always looking. Vega de Santiago, D. (2019). ‘Loving Gami!cation, Profaning Gami!cation’. Volume, Play- bor (56), pp. 39-43.
& 3 profaning gami!cation, Agamben. The cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse knowingly uses the characteristic behaviors of predatory activity in vain. These behaviors are not ef- faced but deactivated and thus open to a new possible use. Agam- ben, G. (2005). Profanations. New York City: Zone Books, pp. 85.
4 extraction & capture, Galloway. What if there is a form of aec- tive expenditure that cannot be recuperated? Galloway, A., Jepson, G., Vega de Santiago, D. (2019). ‘The Rapture of Play: interview with Alexander R. Galloway’, Volume, Playbor (56), pp. 6-9
5 violent libidinal passions, Moue, Freud. To be sure “passions” can also be of an individual nature, but I have chosen to use that term, with its more violent connotations, because it [passions] allows me to underline a dimension of con#ict and to suggest a confrontation between collective political identities - two aspects that I take to be constitutive of politics / Freud brought to the fore the crucial role played by aective libidinal bounds in processes of collective identi!cation. Moue, C. (2017). ‘The Role of Aects in Agonistic Politics’. Cherepanyn, V., Havranek, V., & Stejskalova, T. (Eds.) 68 NOW. Kiev: Visual Culture Research Center, tranzit.cz, Archive Books Berlin, pp. 69-81.
6 the viscuousity of abject, Kristeva, Morton. -fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear”-a #uid haze, an elusive clamminess no sooner has it cropped up than it shades o like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer / Art as climate. I mean precisely art not as rei!ed or distanced thing over but yonder but as infectious, viscous givenness from which one finds oneself incapable of feeling oneself, like Luce Irigaray’s air. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Morton, T. ‘Elementality’. (2015). Cohen, J. J., & Duckert, L. (Eds.). (2015). Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69-81.
7 breathers, Choy. “Here is the unpaid cost: the externality,” I remember him saying. “These are real costs, but they are exter- nalized, meaning they are not paid.” “But someone does pay,” he continued. “Who pays?” He waited a beat, then answered himself. “Breathers pay.” Breathers pay. Choy, T. (2021). ‘Externality, Breath- ers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning’. in Papado- poulos, D., Puig de la Bellacasa, M., Myers, N. (Eds.), Reactivating Elements. Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice. London: Duke University Press, pp. 231-256.
8 white innocence, Wekker. It is my admittedly ambitious and iconoclastic—aim to write an ethnography of dominant white Dutch self-representation. An unacknowledged reservoir of knowl- edge and aects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but unacknowledged part in dominant mean- ing-making processes. I am intrigued by the way that race pops up in unexpected places and moments. Wekker, G (2016). White Inno- cence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
9 queering the matter of race, Ahmed. The “matter’’ of race is very much about embodied reality; seeing oneself or being seen as white or black or mixed does aect what one “can do,” or even where one can go, which can be redescribed in terms of what is and is not within reach. If we begin to consider what is aective about the “unreachable,” we might even begin the task of making “race’’ a rather queer matter. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenom- enology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press.
{ high tech, low life }
{ desirefulfilment }
To be fulfilled means “to be satisfied or happy because of fully developing one’s abilities or character”. When we use the -ful of fulfill in a word like desire, it becomes desireful, a quality. To be desireful means “to be filled with desire: eager.”
Desireful!l-ness is a term born out of the coldness of the freezers of the ful!lment center. It was conceived, during an evening shift, between the aisles D and E, at the moment when the hand/ scanner of the cybernetic picker immigrant being I have become reached the plastic skin of the pink hummus, located on the shelf CH-D-088-14-1.
This fast-speed desirefulfilled game1 2 3, was invented by advanced capitalism, to extract and capture4 our racialized desires and violent passions,5 until exhaustion.
To desirefulfill the fulfilment center is to theorize it as a site of ‘collective racial delirium’ in Franz Fanon’s sense. To desirefulfill is to think with and through the fulfilment center as a container and retainer packed full of the viscosities and intensities of the racialized aects of us, its breathers,6 the cybernetic immigrant workers.
To desirefulfill the ful!lment center is to throw ourselves in, with and through this viscous soup, fuel of the racialized capitalist cosmology of desire.7 It is to be attentive to its extractivist machinery of innocent whiteness,8 so we can perceive the affectivity of structural racism differently and much more intimately.9
Then perhaps we can start unpacking a different kind mythological cybernetic tale for us, its worker-breathers. As a way out, as an alternative viscous soup fuel for other modes of being, breathing and relating in the anti-extractivist, anti-racist cosmic machinery of desire.
