Or, what in the hell is a camp? Or, what in the hell can homo sacer do?
I was in a discussion not too long ago with people I quite like, involving Agamben and Arendt (who I don’t know at all other than I read On Revolution a few years ago and hated it). The subject of freedom of movement came up. A remark was made about us (white north americans) having a freedom of movement that others do not. This is true, but it’s important to note that many people who lack freedom of movement in the sense of rights do have and exercise a freedom of movement in the sense of a capacity to migrate (something Angela has much to say about, and all quite interesting). In other words, capacities are not coterminous with or reducible to legal freedoms.
The conversation turned to camps. Someone talked about Arendt and Agamben, how for Arendt the concentration camps stripped people of all ability to act because they stripped people of their individuality. I said that this was not so - they didn’t strip people of _all_ capacity, especially if we follow Agamben and say that a camp is a juridical structure which can take the physical form of a hotel, airport terminal, or anywhere else where that legal condition obtains. So, the Warsaw Ghetto might be classifiable as a camp, and if we say people there have no capacity to act then what do we do with the uprising there? The response was that Arendt would disagree with Agamben’s extension of the camp, she’d stick to a more strict delimitation of the term, and in those cases people couldn’t act and their memories are not recorded. I pressed the point, and said that this isn’t so: people in camps can act, what about the Woomera detention center breakouts, what about Primo Levi who did record memories, a recording that was itself an act? The response was to say that the activities available in a camp are not meaningfully activities. I asserted something like a belief in human agency, and the response was that the individual is not trans-historical and the implication was made that I was posing some sort of trans-historical and humanist perspective (those being, apparently, a priori bad things).
I wrote a note on my notebook that even we go along with the idea of de-individualization in camps there’s no reason that we must conclude that the pre-individual/de-individualized is inert/inactive - we can just as well assume it’s capable of at least some things (for instance, we have to assume that at least the pre-individual is capable of individualization). I stopped talking and had more coffee, as these are people I like and I was beginning to get close to the edges of ettiquette. What in the hell is the point of ascribing a priori inertness to people in camps, or to anyone for that matter? (One use is to that those bodies can serve to justify oneself as some form of mouthpiece for these others, since they can’t speak or act. This act of becoming a mouthpiece itself has many uses which I won’t go into here.)
Instead isn’t it possible to ascribe a potential volatility and look to examples where in this volatility (re)acts or doesn’t? This borders on an ontological/trans-historical/humanist claim. That doesn’t bother me all that much, but it could probably be made a little cleaner (though probably still unsatisfactory to those predisposed to find helpless victims in need of charity) by posing itself not as a positive claim but as a negative disposition toward demanding justifications from (really, trying to puncture) any accounts of impossibility and exhaustion. Or, in line with that Ranciere quote I like so much, one could take potential volatility to be an opinion (and just an opinion) that one seeks to verify but never finally - that is, those who seek to disprove this opinion are the ones who have to present their arguments. Getting into that position of forcing others to pose their arguments is another matter, however, one of rhetorical tactics - a topic about which I wish I had more useful things to say.
There is also a flipside to this which is that some people have no freedom of movement because they must move. It seems to me that this aspect of the problem is underplayed by Angela and the noborders people, who focus very strongly on the construction of first world nations through border control; it seems to me implausible to reduce the pressures to move to that, and besides this is really not what they intend, since they hate any discussion of what motivations people might have for moving. That’s ok when you are defending people who are being fucked at the border, but it doesn’t help when it turns out that most of them would rather not have moved in the first place. But that would involve saying something about economic conditions, at least stipulating some way in which the no borders ‘policy’ (ie. open borders) would lead to x rather than y outcome, and god, that’s totally out of the question for these people. They can’t even commit to organizing something , not even in principle, so policy considerations, sheesh, that must be downright fascism to them!
I am almost an absolutist for freedom of movement, and I think that the detention camps, at least in Europe and Australia, are monuments to everything that is wrong here, and they cleary must go, no further questions asked. But I am pessimistic about the results of that. I think nothing much would happen. The world would still be a shithole and capitalism would find a way, the state would do fine, as it did before when the borders were open. What pisses me off about the camps is that they are just this arbitrary piece of cruelty, a tyranically petty malice. The suffering on the wrong side of the border dwarves it.
Comment by TCO — November 20, 2005 @ 8:24 am
hi Thiago,
I agree that what I was calling freedom movement is often a compulsion to movement. All I mean to say is that there’s no sense in talking about people as simple victims or incapable of activity, especially not if one thinks one is one those people’s side in some way.
As for noborders and all that, I’ve only encountered it through Angela’s stuff so I can’t really speak to that, Angela may, and could do so much more eloquently that I could, if she wants. I’m definitely a fan to the degree that I know what’s going on. I’m not sure what to make of the policy and outcomes stuff - I’m generally averse to projects that aim at policy, in the sense of changing laws and state practices via some kind of communication process with the state. I just don’t see it being very likely to work re: what I care about. (I’m willing to have my mind changed, though.) I think about this stuff in analogy with workplaces more, as that’s something I understand better. To my mind, contracts with employers and labor laws are for the most part codifications of balances of power. So the project is to impact balances of power by organizing the bases for the exercise of power (with work it’s power on the shopfloor, fighting over wages and conditions etc and in the process building relationships, understanding, and skills). If the bosses and the state want to codify those gains, they’re welcome to do so, but generally I’d want to say that codification follows from power not the other way around. I don’t really know how power could be built and exercised around noborder stuff, but I like the little I’ve read about trying to sabotage the mechanisms of detection and deportation - trying to defend and extend what is, in some sense, a practice of porosity of borders. Again, I’m not sure about this as I don’t know the border stuff very well. That is exactly how I’d want to put it in terms of workplace organizing, though.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 20, 2005 @ 10:06 pm
Of course people have free will, but what’s the point of emphasising that when they choices before them are death or perpetual misery and hopelessness? The freedom of movement must include the freedom to stay put.
The point is that this stuff has little to do with the camps. Getting rid of detention centres in Australia would be a monumental first step, but what would that do in terms of what is going on in Indonesia? Isn’t it a reproduction of the nationalism of concerns to think that we should fight for Indoensians freedoms - once they have crossed the border? I find that odd and parochial. Some people argue that getting rid of border would bring about a situation in which horrible inequalities could not be sustained. It is certainly completely hypocritical to argue that you could remove the inequalities whilst propping up the border, but the converse policy, of opening the border without thinking through the inequality, just hoping it will go away somehow, that to me seems to be an abdication.
The point of ‘policy’ isn’t typing up some draft law or something like that - but the minimal consideration of, how are we going to fix these problems? A lot of radical politics/theory/writing revolves around different ways of making not answering that question seem clever. I find that lamentable and boring, but I can also understand how some people find it offensive. How are you going to organize anything without some idea of what you want? Angela, as I understand her, sees a metaphysical politics at work in the phrasing of this question, so wanting things is somehow just a way of not getting them.
Comment by TCO — November 21, 2005 @ 2:12 am
hi Thiago,
Like I said, I don’t know enough about the noborder network to really comment, but I’ve never let ignorance stop me from speaking before and I’m not planning to start now. The noborder.org site in the ‘about’ section says this:
“The no border network is a tool for all groups and grass root organizations who work on the questions of migrants and asylum seekers in order to struggle alongside with them for freedom of movement, for the freedom for all to stay in the place which they have chosen, against repression and and the many controls which multiply the borders everywhere in all countries.”
So freedom to stay is included. They list five main activities that they do, which are: 1. the deportation alliance 2. the border camps 3. the international action days around October 4. The Campaign to combat global migration management 5. The struggle against deportations and against detention centres and other forms of privation of freedom.
None of these strike me as being aimed at a demand for states to actually abolish borders, in the sense of a call for an end to border. I could be wrong, though. They seem more to me to be aimed at mobilizing against the machinery that maintains the borders as the exist - border policing, which is a big part of borders existing. It strike ms as less a matter of solving the question of what would happen if the borders all went down, and more a matter of attempting open and/or widen holes in the borders as they exist now.
Beyond that, to be honest, I’m not sure what you really mean by the “how are we going to fix these problems” question - and I’m not trying to be coy, I really mean that. Whose the we, and what problems precisely? The problems of borders? Well, the noborder stuff around a trying to gum up the works of border policing seems like a decent start to me, given what (little) I know about the issue.
If you mean the problems of what’s going in Indonesia and elsewhere, to be honest, I have no idea. I know a little bit about how to do workplace organizing in the US and that’s really really hard, even if it may well be comparatively easy in relation to a lot of other activities in a lot of other places. I have no idea how to do much of anything in Indonesia or anywhere else, nor what I can do about those issues from the US. The first place to start, were I involved in that, would be to try and get in touch with some people trying to organize in Indonesia and see what they want and need and how I can be a part of that.
I think in a way this is touching on issues close to what we talked about before regarding guilt and so forth. One can never do enough, depending on one’s point of view, but I don’t find that very livable. As Angela said to me once, “we muddle through”. That’s not very satifying but I think it’s the best we really get. I also think that the absence of a fully worked out plan for the problems of the world should not be considered that much of a fault - nobody’s really got one as far as I know, except perhaps some Leninist fucks who are merely fantasizing and not likely contributing to much that’s actually worthwhile. I think when faced with the question “how are we going to fix these problems” it’s totally fair to turn the question back on the asker - what do you think Thiago? My own view is something like workplace organization, because I know something about that, but I don’t know much about much else so I’m not sure if that’s particularly helpful. It’s also very different to ask that conversation in a planning sense (what will do about this friend who is going to get fired/deported?) versus to ask that in a general sense outside of a context of collective organization. (Not to say the latter shouldn’t be done.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 21, 2005 @ 2:31 am