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Imperceptible Politics Rethinking Radical Politics of Migration and Precarity Today

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Imperceptible Politics Rethinking Radical Politics of Migration and Precarity Today IMPERCEPTIBLE POLITICS RETHINKING RADICAL POLITICS OF MIGRATION AND PRECARITY TODAY Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades des Doktors der Philosophie im Department Sozialwissenschaften der Universität Hamburg Vorgelegt von Vassilios Tsianios aus Hamburg Hamburg 2007 ERSTE GUTACHTERIN: PROF. DR. PHIL. MARIANNE PIEPER ZWEITER GUTACHTER: PROF. DR. PHIL. HERMANN KORTE DATUM DER DISPUTATION: 04.07.2008 –2– CONTENTS Prologue.............................................................................................................. 1 Part A: THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE PRESENT I. Sovereignty reconsidered 1. National sovereignty.............................................................................. 13 2. Transnational governance...................................................................... 27 3. Postliberal aggregates ............................................................................ 40 II. Exit! Escape! 4. Vagabonds............................................................................................. 55 5. Outside representation ........................................................................... 76 6. Imperceptible politics ........................................................................... 91 Part B: A GUIDE THROUGH IMPERCEPTIBLE POLITICS III. Mobility and migration 7. Europeanisation of migration control .................................................. 106 8. Liminal Institutions of Porocracy ........................................................ 118 9. Aegean Transit..................................................................................... 136 10. Autonomy of migration ..................................................................... 159 IV. Labour and precarity 11. Embodied capitalism & precarity ...................................................... 183 12. Normalising the excess of precarious subjectivities.......................... 198 13. Inappropriate/d sociability................................................................. 211 References....................................................................................................... 220 PROLOGUE Social change This Dissertation is about social change. Or better, it is about social changes which are propelled by seemingly insignificant events of social life: when one undoes a standardised account of her life-story beyond given representations; when one works twelve hours per day and is paid for three; when one crosses the Mediterranean in a fishing boat. Contemporary discussions of social and political transformation – discussions taking place both in public discourse as well as in social theory – grant such incidents little relevance. These everyday experiences do not refer to a grand narrative of social change, nor are these events identifiable elements of broader, unified social movements. This Dissertation argues that the forces of change today can be traced in, and hinge on, these imperceptible everyday events of social life. But because of their seeming insignificance, they are easily overlooked. Imperceptible politics is the term I employ to describe a mode of social change which is simultaneously elusive and forceful enough to challenge the contemporary regimes of control in the societies of the Global North Atlantic. The first Part of the Dissertation considers how imperceptible politics arise and operate in the field of contemporary polity. The contemporary formation of power: Postliberal sovereignty (Section I) The main actors in contemporary global politics are neither nation states nor transnational institutions. Rather, today's global actors are comprised of segments of what traditional sociology used to call social institutions and social strata: social classes, interest groups, social subjectivities, national and –1– international institutions. Segments of these social institutions and strata are vertically aligned with each other, whilst others are excluded from such alliances. In Chapter Three I describe how vertical aggregates intermingle segments of these institutions and strata and create large formations which act on a global scale. Thus, the main feature of today's formations of political sovereignty is its verticalisation. My account of the verticalisation of sovereignty is preceded by a genealogical analysis of political sovereignty. I start with the modes of political engagement privileged by national sovereignty (Chapter One). Historically, national sovereignty is a matrix which connects a territory with a population. This connection gives birth to the political entity of the people as One (Volk), that is national space is understood to be inhabited by a unified set of people. The particular category of people as One is invented and sustained by the double-R axiom: rights & representation. A nation’s citizens make up its people who are supposedly represented in the national corpus and enjoy certain rights (citizenship being the most crucial). But as I show in my genealogical analysis, this all-inclusive liberal vision of the nation state is impossible. In Chapter Two I consider how the limitations of the double-R axiom are exacerbated by transnational forces which traverse the realm of the nation. National sovereignty is thrown into crisis. The attack on the double-R axiom starts slowly in the post-war period and erupts in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, this attack entails a thorough interrogation of the representational practices of national sovereignty. Previously excluded social groups contest canonical (and universal) modes of political representation and demand inclusion. There are mass exoduses from rigid forms of national regulation and they correspond with capital’s exodus from the boundaries of the nation state and the rise of the neoliberal project. Transnationalism emerges as a form of sovereignty which attempts to reconcile the crisis of national sovereignty with pervasive supranational forces. The exhaustive restructuring of social, cultural –2– and economic milieus which unfolds under these new geopolitical conditions effects the transition from national sovereignty to transnational governance. One of the main characteristics of transnational governance is the attempt to create a global horizontal space, a space in which new modes of regulation can be effective. Others call this project globalisation, neo-imperialism, or empire. Of course the creation of a global unified, smooth, horizontal geo-space is, in itself, a means of domination. Countries do not have equal chances and powers to participate in and benefit from transnational operations. Nevertheless, there is something missing in this account of domination: globalisation has its winners and losers, but these winners and losers cannot be conceived as entire nation states. It is not even the case that nation states in their entirety participate in the processes of globalisation. Rather, we have alignments of distinct segments of different nation states, certain institutions, social groups, local or transnational companies, cultural and technoscientific bodies which operate in and attempt to dominate global transnational space. These are the vertical aggregates which I described earlier. In Chapter Three I discuss the formation and function of these postliberal aggregates. Their raison d’être is to create powerful actors as vertical composites which lie beyond the liberal axiomatic of the double-R principle. Overcoming the predicament of resistance: Imperceptible politics (Section II) How does social change happen in these conditions? What is the meaning of transformation? Where can we locate sites for intervention and change? The rest of the Dissertation addresses these questions, as they pertain to the new conditions of dominance imposed by postliberal sovereignty. Section II rethinks the relation between power, resistance and change. I start, in Chapter Four, by reconsidering the relation between control and flight and arguing that trajectories of flight precede their regulation. The productivity of power is –3– commonly thought to function in two related ways: processes of subjectification constitute individuals and biopolitics constitute populations as objects of control. Against this, I argue that the productivity of power is its capacity to capture and capitalise on people’s evacuation of spaces of control. People's flight, refusal, sabotage, exit all are the grounds on which power acquires its productivity. Exit comes first. Each of the three Sections of the second Part of this Dissertation describes the primacy of exit as it operates in different realms of social life today. Initially, I introduce this argument by reconsidering the history of mobility and its control in the late Middle Ages and in early capitalism. Vagabondage and other forms of unregulated mobility forced the transformation of disciplinary power so as to translate and tame this mobility into the subjectivity of the salaried worker. Chapter Five explores theoretical articulations of the primacy of exit over the primacy of control. The movement of exit is always a historically and culturally situated form of resistance to control. We cannot understand exit as a decontextualised, overarching form of resistance. In this chapter I consider some powerful modes of evacuating the spaces of control in specific movements pertaining to the refusal of work, the refusal of the phallocentric subject, and the exit from an organicist understanding of the body. Each of these movements entails an exit from existing forms of
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