User:Sara/Essay2

Mobility and Refuge

Following the night of the 2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations, a wave of complaints covering theft and several levels of sexual assault against women were reported across Germany. The perpetrators were claimed to have been a few hundreds or possibly around a thousand men with allegedly Arab and North African appearance. Amid the confusion triggered by conflicting stories between media coverage and police statements, some reports claimed the attacks were performed by Syrian refugees who were recently admitted to Germany after Angela Merkel’s newly implemented open-door refugee policy.

As sexual violence and discrimination against women persist across the globe, the premature accusations emphasized by the aforementioned confusion propose a dangerous turn to both refugees and women subjugated to violence. In an attempt to amplify feelings of panic and fury towards refugees fleeing war and economic stagnation, right-wing descriptions of the event failed to challenge the underlying power that discursively establishes racial and gendered prejudices in the public sphere, transforming the idea of the commons into a hostile and unsafe resource.

Populist media descriptions of an army of testosterone bombs and an invasion by savage peoples arriving to Europe with predatory intentions, and threatening decades of struggle towards political freedom, democracy, and full human rights, inspire fear and anger. Today, people protest in the streets of Germany, Austria, Poland, Sweden and others, asking to reclaim the commons from those poor uneducated sexually deprived immigrants.

I mention here the commons to refer to the set of rules and power establishments that dictate public life. What is currently referred to as the refugee crisis is in fact a turbulent understanding of what the commons is supposed to be. As refugees continue to find new ways to cross European borders, they practice their freedom of mobility regardless of their citizenship and their legal subjectivity. As they appear loitering in the urban landscape of Europe’s cities and towns, with their dark skin and weary bodies, they manifest certain unrest to the programmed ways of European living. They move in aleatory ways. Their bodies wander with intent.

In the past couple of years, the world has been witnessing a major influx of migrants; a flow that has been described as the largest since the end of World War II. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move just within Europe, and another four million are dispersed in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. However, despite the constant efforts to stop their flow, refugees keep marching by the hundreds and the thousands across highways, forests and rivers, endlessly challenging border-state policies.

As refugees meet the dangerous routes to their intended destinations, they are either killed on their way to safety, or kept in old prisons and pushed into rural areas where they are purposefully gathered to outnumber the hosting village’s inhabitants, incurring a fear of invasion. A major backlash against refugees starts to appear and manifest itself as governments and local authorities compete to not only criminalize and illegalize refugees’ movement, but also to “hierarchize them according to countries of origin and race, into good seekers of protection who have fled war, and those others, bad immigrants, who only seek a better life, meaning work, and who immediately become competitors to the majorative society.”1

The hierarchization of refugees as such is a way to recreate the status of a refugee under a capitalist directive that operates on the distinction between labor and care. Separating those who labor from those who need protection is in this sense constitutive to the development of liberal capitalist society in Europe according to political theorist at the European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP), Isabell Lorey (2015). She argues, in her lecture on Autonomy and Precarisation that determining those distinctions sets a deeply gendered axiom that pronounces both labor and autonomy as male figures of independence, where freedom of movement and mobility in the public sphere are key conditions for political action. This freedom of movement is revealed beyond the limitations of the private sphere that is still associated with a rather feminine attribute.

The reactions following the sexual assaults in Germany articulated this distinction between the autonomous and the precarious in a rather complex and perverse way. People protested, petitioned, rallied, posted videos, comments, and tweets calling for justice to be inflicted upon the attackers and that the streets are made safe for [our] women. Despite the fact that of any cause calling for the abolition and punishment of misogynic crimes and sexual discrimination against women around the world is a highly dignified, the reactions following this particular event only tends to implement the old tactic of turning one marginal group against another. They tend to conceal all the interconnections and interoperations that determine both groups as political subjects within the constraints of social interdependency in the public sphere, where mobility is a key element to freedom and equality.

Nishant Shah, co-founder and director of research for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, explains this interconnection so well in his lecture on loitering, littering and lettering. Shah starts off his lecture by recounting the tragic stories of two rape cases that rocked the Indian society in the past few years. The first case being that of Bhanwari Devi, a worker who was gang raped by six Brahmin (upper cast) men while performing her duties at the Women’s Development Project in Rajasthan in 1992. The second case is the more recent incident of the physiotherapy intern who was raped by six men on a bus in New Delhi back in 2012. Unlike Bhanwari Devi, whose case was denied justice on the basis of her being a low cast woman who’d never be touched by a Brahmin let alone raped, the New Delhi case resulted in what Shah calls a cacophony of rage.

Departing from those two tragic events, Shah argues that the denial of justice to a lower cast woman in India’s complex societal fabric as opposed to the rage and fury invoked by the case of the young intern in New Delhi, narrates that under the capitalist gendering of the exploitation of labor, bodies that matter are the bodies that deserve to be protected. He proceeds to explain that in the context of political, social, and economical restructuring of India in the twentieth century, women embodied an economical value in the world. For this reason, the streets needed to be made safe for them to go to work or go shopping or engage in the daily consumption of cultural activities. Women’s bodies, Shah proceeds, became the infrastructure that supports our connected networks and circulating worlds. In this sense, the commons was constructed in the collective imagination at the time, as the space where people do things, where they perform action, and thus, bodies that do not act or add value are bodies that need to be punished and excluded from the commons.

Going back from Nishant Shah to Europe’s current description of the refugee crisis. In one of John Oliver’s episodes, he satirically commented on David Cameron’s description of immigrants trying to arrive in the UK as “a swarm of refugees”. This language matters, Oliver stresses, and indeed, it does. A swarm, in what Franco Berardi (2012) calls the world of techno-linguistic automatisms, is a collective organism, which performs actions that are directed and dictated by a common intentionality. A swarm moves and circulates according to programmed routes and pathways. The word could more accurately describe a group of passengers walking through the meticulously designed queue lines in airports for example. It could describe the viral; that which travels through a network, coordinated and proud. The swarm, like a network, is a collective of beings, of human and machines that perform common actions thanks to procedures that make possible their interconnection and interoperation (Berardi, 2015).

Aren’t we the swarm then? Aren’t we the ones who follow the technical rules of the game? Aren’t we who allow the streets of a city to walk us through our daily making

John laughs and says: “If I hear there are a lot of kittens coming my way, I’m going to be a delighted, but if I hear there was a swarm of kittens approaching, I’m grabbing a shotgun and I’m getting to high ground because I’m going to let those furry f***ers take me alive”.

“There was a strong sense of women’s bodies in public as moving with intention, with purpose, with value, because they were developing and supporting the capillaries of consumption and traffic on the new commons that India is constructing for itself, or in other words, we wanted to protect our women’s bodies because those bodies were the infrastructure that supports our connected networks and circulating worlds. We needed to create the commons as a safe space because a woman’s body has an economic value in the world. They perform fruitful action and hence need to be protected. It is this idea that of the commons as the space where people do things. The exclusion from the commons is for bodies that do not perform action, or rather, do not perform actions that are valued by those who guard and define what the commons is supposed to be. Bodies that act are the bodies that matter, bodies that do not add value, or bodies that are not in motion, not circulating, are the bodies that need to be punished. This sheds light on the long-standing law against loitering, and more specifically, loitering with intent. I find the phenomenon of loitering as challenge to the ways we understand the commons, especially in the post-digital turn. Loitering could be the key entry point into understanding the bodies that can take a claim to the commons and the bodies that are only allowed to pass through or appear with an apology in the space of the commons.

The concept of loitering, in Nishant Shah’s work, is an anecdotal approach to the notion of the commons. What is the commons and how is it shaped in the collective imagination of a people, how is it constantly claimed and reclaimed by bodies that move within and through the commons.

References:

• Berardi, Franco (2012) The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series

• Lorey, Isabell (2015) Autonomy and Precarisation. (Neo)Liberal Entanglements of Labor and Care, https://vimeo.com/147006898, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

• Nishant Shah (2015) Loitering, Littering, and Lettering, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIurZCqnV9c, Transmediale

• Oliver, John, Migrants and Refugees (HBO) (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umqvYhb3wf4