This paper considers the importance of the notion of turbulence for the theorisation of mobility. Turbulence, as disordered and unpredictable mobilities, can be contrasted with smooth 'laminar' flow -where everything is moving 'correctly'. This paper borrows from the philosophies of Michel Serres and Manuel DeLanda to think about turbulence as a process which makes visible the always-contingent orderings of infrastructural mobilities. The paper is illustrated with examples from container shipping and, particularly, the grounding of the MSC Napoli container ship off the coast of Southern England. Turbulent mobilities are contrasted with the smooth operation of infrastructural mobilities that are supposed to remain silent and invisible. The dramatic and very visible instances of turbulence, that no system can ever predict or make disappear, provide an entry point into the ordering of a mobile world.

Recent notions of surface emanating from poststructuralist theories posit surface as an 'event': expressionistic, restless, turbulent. In this paper I focus on a different idea of surface: one where the multiplicity of such restlessness is apparently immobilised. This perspective is tellingly advocated by the logistically driven movement of commodities on a global scale. Steinberg has argued that postmodern capitalism utilises a spatial logic that is redolent of earlier forms of capitalism, viewing ocean space in particular as a controllable void. Building on this debate, I set out to interrogate the construction of a 'global surface of logistical integration': those spatiotemporal mechanisms of control employed by the commercial logistics sector, which attempt to create an integrated and continuous global surface devoid of differences between ocean and land. In particular, the intermodal shipping container and its attendant apparatus of standardisation is taken as a paradigm of producing surface compatibility.

A simple journey through a fog-bound shoreline. This paper reflects on such a journey to investigate the relationship between aerial space and the elemental relational materialism produced by fog. It takes the experience of fog as its conceptual pivot, using this ‘indexing’ of air to argue for a reconsideration of the visual mechanisms of aerial space. As a phenomenon, the presence of fog generates a variety of distillations: tellingly, for this paper, it confiscates the horizon on a temporary basis, forestalling the perception of this visible line or ground of calibration. It is the loss of perceivable distance through the opacity of fog that strands us in the momentary instant of disorientation. The initial experience of disorientation is, however, set within a more complex agenda that acknowledges the connective potential of fog to deepen the relationship between vision, distance, and embodied immersion in aerial space. In particular, I address Casey's work on the incoming power of place and the outgoing function of the body to argue that fog acts as a gathering-force, intensifying the immanent entanglements of body with world.

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This paper sets out to address the increasing strategic power of logistics management in the context of commodity and corporeal mobilities. In doing so it looks to the strategy of interconnectivity in order to address the management of legitimated mobilities. It is argued that the geopower of commodity mobility is premised on the infrastructural strength offered by logistics management, a form of spatial and temporal control that operates through increasingly territorialising means. However, given the infrastructural 'tension' that processes of standardisation have created, the paper also concerns the appropriation of commodity mobility networks for the purposes of illegitimated corporeal mobility. In part this is intended to develop the critiques of globalisation which challenged the image of transnational mobility networks as part of a borderless, boundless present typified most readily by the flows of information, capital and commodities. By contrast the 'desperate mobilities' of undocumented immigrants attests to the rather more tangled manifestations of mobility that many individuals have to traverse. In particular I focus on the fallibility of strategic sites within global commodity movement and the uses of 'extra-logistical knowledge'.