Escape Routes Papadopoulos 00 pre i 6/6/08 16:45:48 Papadopoulos 00 pre ii 6/6/08 16:45:48 Escape Routes Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century DIMITRIS PAPADOPOULOS, NIAMH STEPHENSON and VASSILIS TSIANOS Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI Papadopoulos 00 pre iii 6/6/08 16:45:48 First published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos 2008 The right of Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos to be identifi ed as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 2779 2 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 2778 5 Paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Papadopoulos 00 pre iv 6/6/08 16:45:48 Joy is the ultimate proof. Oswald de Andrade All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of the laughing people. Mikhail Bakhtin Papadopoulos 00 pre v 6/6/08 16:45:48 Papadopoulos 00 pre vi 6/6/08 16:45:48 Contents Acknowledgements viii List of Figures xi Prologue xii PART I: THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE PRESENT Section I: Sovereignty and Control Reconsidered 1. National Sovereignty 3 2. Transnational Governance 15 3. Postliberal Aggregates 25 Section II: Escape! 4. Vagabonds 42 5. Outside Representation 55 6. Imperceptible Politics 71 PART II: A CONTEMPORARY ITINERARY OF ESCAPE Section III: Life and Experience 7. The Life/Culture System 85 8. The Regime of Life Control: The Formation of Emergent Life 107 9. Everyday Excess and Continuous Experience 137 Section IV: Mobility and Migration 10. The Regime of Mobility Control: Liminal Porocratic Institutions 162 11. Excessive Movements in Aegean Transit 183 12. Autonomy of Migration 202 Section V: Labour and Precarity 13. The Regime of Labour Control: Precarious Life and Labour 222 14. Normalising the Excess of Precarity 238 15. Inappropriate/d Sociability 250 References 259 Index 288 Papadopoulos 00 pre vii 6/6/08 16:45:48 Acknowledgements If there is something imperceptible in this book it is the connections, relations and cooperation with people who have sustained our living and thinking over the years we have spent working on this project. We are grateful to our parents, our families and all the people who have in so many various, precious and irreplaceable ways accompanied us throughout the process of this book. We deeply thank all of you: Rutvica Andrijasevic, Thomas Atzert, Jill Bennett, Lone Bertelsen, Huw Beynon, Barbara Biglia, Hywel Bishop, Deborah Black, Finn Bowring, Bruce Braun, Steven Brown, Jayne Bye, Cathryn Carson, James Clifford, John Cromby, Nick Dines, Rosalyn Diprose, Emma Dowling, Amanda Ehrenstein, Peter Fairbrother, Akis Gavriilidis, Irina Giles, Ros Gill, Angel Gordo-Lopez, Ghassan Hage, Frigga Haug, Nanna Heidenreich, Berenice Hernadez, Gail Hershatter, Martin Hildebrand- Nilshon, Arnd Hofmeister, Wendy Hollway, Jan Simon Hutta, Frank John, Vassilis Karavezyris, Chung-Woon Kim, Susan Kippax, Hermann Korte, Giorgos Koutsoubas, Astrid Kusser, Brigitta Kuster, Olga Lafazani, Joanna Latimer, Ramona Lenz, Isabell Lorey, Alessio Lunghi, Brent Mackie, Elisabetta Magnani, Marta Malo, Athanasios Marvakis, Angela Melitopoulos, Sandro Mezzadra, Catherine Mills, Yann Moulier Boutang, Jost Müller, Tobias Mulot, Anna Munster, Andrew Murphie, Toni Negri, Brett Neilson, Paul O’Beirne, Sven Opitz, Mary Orgel, José Pérez de Lama/Osfa, Ute Osterkamp, Natascha Panagiotidis, Dimitris Parsanoglou, Ilektra Petrakou, Marianne Pieper, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Kane Race, Gerald Raunig, Enrica Rigo, Regina Röhmhild, Klaus Ronneberger, Marsha Rosengarten, Cécile Schenck, Ernst Schraube, Thomas Seibert, Kostas Sfyris, Sanjay Sharma, Peter Spielmann, Hank Stam, Steven Stanley, Paul Stenner, Giorgos Tsiakalos, kylie valentine, Marion von Osten, Valerie Walkerdine, Wibke Widuch, Debi Withers, Anthony Zwi. We are immensely thankful to our Pluto editor, David Castle, whose encouraging and steady support made this book possible, and to Ioannis Savvidis, whose views on things have not only resulted in the cover, but also contributed to many ideas in this book. Special thanks go also to Aida Ibrahim for her invaluable help in preparing the images and to Douglas Henderson for his editorial work on our viii Papadopoulos 00 pre viii 6/6/08 16:45:48 Acknowledgements ix texts over the past years. The reviews of the four anonymous readers of the book helped us greatly as we reworked the original manuscript. When we later learnt the names of three of these reviewers – Graeme Chesters, Chris Connery and Ian Welsh – we realised that this was no coincidence, as their work had already shaped our thinking a lot. Finally we are indebted to Sabine Hess, Serhat Karakayali and Efthimia Panagiotidis for all these years of close cooperation – some of the chapters in this book not only are the result of common work and activism, but were researched in close collaboration; in particular Chapter 10 with Sabine, Chapter 4 with Serhat and Chapters 10 and 11 with Efthimia. We have greatly benefi ted from participating in or being supported by the following organisations: the Association for Cultural Studies; Assoziation A Berlin; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the annual meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science; the Australian National Centre for HIV Social Research; b_books Berlin; the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany (Kulturstiftung des Bundes); the New Mobilities conference at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics in the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales; the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Cologne Kunstverein; the Crossroads Conferences for Cultural Studies; the Department of Psychology and Education at the Free University of Berlin; the German Research Foundation (DFG); the Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Frankfurt; the Institute for Sociology at Hamburg University; the International Society for Theoretical Psychology; LaborK3000; the Offi ce for History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley; Project Transit Migration; the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales; the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. Most of the ideas in this book originate in our involvement in the EuroMayDay activist network, the Frassanito network, the HIV and gay communities in Sydney, the Kanak Attak group, the MigMap collective, the no borders activist group, the PRECLAB network and the Webring/Mapping Precarity collective. Were this book to have a future life we would like to see it in these contexts. Duke University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Sage Publications and Verlag Turia + Kant have granted permission to use material from papers they have published. An earlier version of Section I was published in ‘How to Do Sovereignty Without People? The Subjectless Papadopoulos 00 pre ix 6/6/08 16:45:48 x Escape Routes Condition of Postliberal Power’ in Boundary 2: International Journal of Literature and Culture. Chapter 9 contains ideas which were initially published in ‘Breaking Alignments Between “the Personal” and “the Individual” or What Can Psychology Do for Feminist Politics Now’ in Feminism and Psychology. The second part of Chapter 12 was adapted from ‘The Autonomy of Migration: The Animals of Undocumented Mobility’, in A. Hickey-Moody and P. Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues and it is reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Parts of earlier versions of Chapters 14 and 15 appeared in ‘Prekarität: eine wilde Reise ins Herz des verkörperten Kapitalismus, oder: Wer hat Angst vor der immateriellen Arbeit?’ in G. Raunig and U. Wuggenig (eds), Kritik der Kreativität. Wien: Verlag Turia + Kant. Papadopoulos 00 pre x 6/6/08 16:45:48 List of Figures 1. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d’Invenzione, plate VII: The Drawbridge, c. 1750. 4 2. Albrecht Dürer, Der Zeichner des weiblichen Models (Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman), 1525. 9 3. Perspectival Grid. 10 4. The Garden of Exile and Emigration in the Jewish Museum of Berlin, architect Daniel Libeskind, 1998. 16 5. Guy Debord with Asger Jorn, The Naked City: A Psychogeographic Map of Paris, 1957. 20 6. Stuart Kauffman, Cellular Traffi c, 1995. 22 7. The Garden of Exile and Emigration in the Jewish Museum of Berlin (detail), architect Daniel Libeskind, 1998. 24 8. Central Building, BMW Plant, Leipzig, architect Zaha Hadid, 2005. 26 9. Central Building, BMW Plant, Leipzig (detail), architect Zaha Hadid, 2005. 29 10. Nick Di Girolamo, phase contrast micrograph of stem cell colonies, 2008. 31 11. Diagram of the relation between control, excess and escape in the fi elds of life, mobility and labour. 78 12. Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises, 1910. 89 13. Oskar Nerlinger, An die Arbeit (Going to work), 1929. 95 14. Oskar Nerlinger, Die Straßen der Arbeit (The Streets of Work), 1930. 96 15. Wir gehoeren dir (We belong to you), Olympiastadion, Berlin, 1939. 102 16. Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. 105 17. Honda Asimo Humanoid Robot (advertisement), 2002. 133 18. Labor k3000 in collaboration with Transit Migration, MigMap (Mapping European Politics on Migration), Map 3: Europeanisation (detail), 2006.