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Technologies of Extraterritorialisation, Statist Visuality and Irregular Migrants and Refugees Joseph Pugliese Published online: 18 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Joseph Pugliese (2013) Technologies of Extraterritorialisation, Statist Visuality and Irregular Migrants and Refugees, Griffith Law Review, 22:3, 571-597, DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2013.10877013 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2013.10877013

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TECHNOLOGIES OF EXTRATERRITORIALISATION, STATIST VISUALITY AND IRREGULAR MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES


Joseph Pugliese*

This article examines the increasing use of technologies of surveillance and identification by both the European Union and Australia in order to biopolitically preclude and control the entry of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from the global South. The central concern of the article is how these technologies of extraterritorialisation, as deployed by the state, function to constitute regimes of statist visuality that produce both symbolic and physical forms of violence for their target subjects. In the course of the article, I critically examine the European Unionʼs EUROSUR project, Frontex and its Eurodac system and Australiaʼs Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004 in order to stage a comparison of the various modalities of statist visuality deployed by states in their biopolitical governance of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and to bring into critical focus the often lethal effects of these regimes of statist visuality. I conclude by presenting a form of counter-visuality to the stateʼs way of seeing by discussing the work of the contemporary Moroccan-French visual artist Bouchra Khalili, whose Mapping Journey Project stands as an agentic resignification and reclamation of the fraught journeys of irregular migrants through the surveilled lands of the global North.

In the context of the flows of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from the global South to the countries of the global North, a number of surveillance and identificatory technologies have been mobilised by both Australia and the European Union (EU) in order to biopolitically govern and manage target subjects. In the course of this article, I examine a number of critical points of intersection that inscribe the biopolitical apparatuses of surveillance and control deployed by both Australia and the EU in their tracking and processing of irregular migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. My focus is on biometric technologies, human detection sensors, surveillance drones, satellite tracking systems and interoperable databases. Situated in this context, I examine how law enables what I term statist regimes of visuality that are, in effect, constitutive of both symbolic and physical modalities of violence. Statist regimes of visuality refer to discursively mediated ways of seeing enabled by the state and its laws. As *

Professor and Research Director, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University.


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embodied discursive practices, statist regimes of visuality determine not only what one sees, but also what one does. I raise and critically address a number of questions pertaining to statist regimes of visuality: What are the key attributes of statist visuality? What role does visuality play in the exercise, consolidation and reproduction of state power? How is statist visuality encoded in, and enabled by, law and its attendant technologies? What are its signature modalities? As I elaborate in some detail below, statist regimes of visuality anatomise the bodies of target subjects by digitally seizing the corporeal attributes that serve to individuate and identify them – for example, once corporeal attributes are biometrically scanned and digitally processed, biometrically processed subjects no longer have control over their identificatory biodata as this information, once it has been stored in interoperable databases, is disseminated across diverse spaces and sites. In this article, I focus on the EU’s EUROSUR project, Frontex and its Eurodac system and on Australia’s Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004 in order to stage a comparison of the various modalities of statist visuality deployed by states in their biopolitical governance of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and to bring into critical focus the often lethal effects of these regimes of statist visuality. Apparatuses of Statist Visuality on the Border and at the PreFrontier On 10 October 2012, the Council of the European Union issued the draft legislation titled ‘Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council Establishing the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR)’.1 In its proposal, the EU Council argues that EUROSUR is ‘necessary in order to strengthen the information exchange and operational cooperation between national authorities of Member States’.2 EUROSUR is presented as providing ‘these authorities and the Agency with the infrastructure and tools needed to improve their situational awareness and reaction capability at the external borders of the Member States of the European Union for the purpose of … detecting … preventing and combating … illegal migration and cross-border crime … and consequently contributing to better protecting and saving the lives of migrants’.3 As a number of commentators have remarked, precisely how EUROSUR will work to protect and save ‘the lives of migrants’ is never exactly spelled out in the document in any detail.4 In fact, ‘search and rescue is explicitly 1

The proposed EU legislation will apply from 1 October 2013. On the legal status of such EU legislation, Rijpma and Cremona (2007), p 5 draw attention to the fact that the ‘European legal order is a system of attributed powers. This means the EU does not possess a general legislative competence, but that it must be possible to trace back the EU’s actions to a particular legal basis laid down in the founding treaties.’

2

Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p. 3.

3

Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p. 3, emphasis and ellipses in original. Human Rights Watch (2012b) notes that ‘The proposal does not … lay down any procedures, guidelines, or systems for ensuring that rescue at sea is implemented

4


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excluded from the scope of EUROSUR. Consequently, there is no obligation for member states to improve cooperation of their border control authorities with authorities responsible for search and rescue via the national coordination centres.’ 5 The disingenuous status of EUROSUR’s commitment to ‘protect and save lives’ has, in fact, been underscored by a recent amendment that, significantly, further neutralises the power of this already vague provision by replacing ‘as well as protecting and saving lives of migrants at the external borders of the Member States of the Union’ with the weasel word phrase ‘therefore contributing to better protecting and saving lives’.6 The supplanting of ‘as well as’ with ‘contributing to better’ effectively introduces an amorphous claim that is at no stage quantified or substantiated in the proposal. EUROSUR is seen as augmenting Frontex, the EU agency charged with monitoring and managing the EU’s borders, precisely by bringing into play a constellation of surveillance technologies and capabilities. Frontex’s motto is ‘Libertas Securitas Justitia’. Significantly, in its mission statement, Frontex drops any reference to Justitia and only focuses on Libertas and Securitas: ‘Frontex strengthens the freedom and the security of the citizens of the EU by complementing the national border system of the Member States.’ 7 The elision of ‘justice’ from Frontex’s mission statement unintentionally serves to draw attention to the very travesties of justice that the agency has been accused of perpetrating: For some time, Frontex has been criticised for its ‘push back’ operations during which refugee vessels are being intercepted and escorted back to their ports of origin. In February 2012, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for carrying out such operations, arguing that Italian border guards had returned all refugees found on an intercepted vessel back to Libya – including those with a right to asylum and international protection.8

Inscribed in Italy’s ‘push back’ operations, with its specific focus on intercepting boats carrying irregular migrants and refugees in international effectively as a paramount objective. Beyond the stated goal of saving lives, the new system reflects the traditional focus on securing borders and preventing arrivals.’ Nield (2012) questions, for example, how unmanned drones can possibly help people in a crisis situation at sea. Hayes and Vermeulen (2012), p 5, draw attention to the manner in which ‘During FRONTEX operations, shipwrecked refugees will not be brought to the nearest port – although that is what international law stipulates – instead they will be landed in a port of the member country in charge of the operation. This reflects a “nimby” attitude – not in my backyard.’ 5 6

7

8

Keller (2012). European Parliament Committee on Budgets (2012), p 7, emphasis and ellipses in original. European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union [referenced from here on as EAMOCEBMSEU] (2012), p 10. Hayes and Vermeulen (2012), p 4.

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waters and forcing them back to Libya,9 is a dense and largely effaced colonial history that needs to be resurrected and marked. ‘This is a history,’ writes Daniela Melfi in her landmark work on this topic, ‘that has become increasingly forgotten.’ 10 From the historical moment of its unification until the early 1970s, Italy was a mass exporter of migrants and political refugees. North Africa was a target for Italian colonial settlements, with Libya and Tunisia identified as key sites. As with the contemporary context, the push factors driving Italian migrants and refugees to embark on their journeys to Libya and Tunisia included dire poverty, geographical proximity between Italy and North Africa and political persecution.11 Federico Cresti and Daniela Melfi articulate the elided dimensions of this other, inverse history of irregular migration: The phenomenon of clandestine migration is not actually something new in the context of the Mediterranean; on the contrary, a substantial part of the migrants traversing the Sicilian Channel from Tunisia towards Panteleria or Agrigento, or even from Libya towards Lampedusa or Siracusa, in fact retrace in an inverse manner the same routes followed by Sicilian migrants up until the immediate post-war period. We note, moreover, that the sites from which contemporary irregular migrants embark from North Africa are exactly those places that once were destination sites for Italian migrants.12

As I have remarked elsewhere, this colonial history also possesses a dense racialised history of Eurocentrism and northern Italian preoccupations with whiteness. The effacement of this other history – a history of white historicide that has attempted to erase the Italian South’s deep cultural ties to North Africa and the Middle East – is conceptually tied to the contemporary efforts to thwart what I have elsewhere termed the ‘returns of the Souths of the South’.13 The long colonial history of exporting mostly Southern Italian migrants to Italy’s North African colonies became one way of attempting to address the so-called ‘Southern Question’. As Ali Abullatif Ahmida notes, ‘Settler colonialism became a solution to the problems stemming from late industrialization and social conflict in Italy.’ 14 In the Fascist scheme of Italian colonial settlements in North Africa, Libya in fact was viewed as

9

Human Rights Watch (2012b) writes that ‘In February 2012, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for these practices. The court found that summary pushbacks to Libya amounted to collective expulsions and exposed people to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in Libya … In short, Italy had violated its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and international law.’

10

Melfi (2008), p 52. My translation from the Italian. See also Palombo (2010), pp 50–2.

11

Melfi (2008), pp 72–3.

12

Cresti and Melfi (2006), p 5. My translation from the Italian.

13

See Pugliese (2007).

14

Ahmida (2009), p 141.



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Italy’s ‘fourth shore’ (‘la quarta sponda’).15 In her mapping of the complex intersections of Italian colonial history in the context of finding solutions for the Southern Question, Lara Palombo unpacks the manner in which the ‘South was to become a source for the provision of the necessary labour force to colonize Somalia (1891), Abyssinia (1887–1941), Libya (1911– 1932) and Ethiopia (1935–1936)’.16 In a quite different, yet politically analogous manner, non-Indigenous Australia’s history of colonial occupation of the continent and the contemporary hysteria about ‘boat people’ is inscribed with dense and unresolved issues of invasion, usurped Indigenous sovereignty and political displacement, and attempted legitimation of this sovereignty through the demonising of irregular migrants and refugees.17 ‘In a similar vein to Australia’s Pacific Solution,’ writes Palombo, ‘the EU’s current policies on irregular migrants remap white hegemonic relations in the ways that expand Italian and EU sovereign relations outside their territorial jurisdiction … [and] that, through the elevation of the detention camps and patrolling of the seas, works to ban new arrivals from the sovereignty of the Italian nation and of the European Union.’18 To return to Frontex’s motto – ‘freedom, security, justice’ – the elision of ‘justice’ from the authors’ discussion, and Frontex’s exclusive preoccupation with issues of ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ has profound Foucauldian resonances. In his lectures on biopolitics and the critical role of liberalism in shaping the liberal democratic state, Foucault offers a valuable insight into the discursive infrastructure that effectively enables the emergence of this diffuse and heterogeneous concept of the state. ‘Liberalism,’ he notes, ‘turns into a mechanism continually having to arbitrate between the freedom and security of individuals by reference to this notion of danger.’ The liberal democratic state is predicated on ‘the interplay of security/freedom’.19 It is precisely this interplay of security/freedom and its charged reference to danger that has been foundational in the establishment of the military–industrial–surveillance complex. In the context of the EU’s militarisation of its borders, the military–industrial–surveillance complex is playing a pivotal role in securing contracts to supply a vast array of new surveillance and interception technologies.20 What is emerging, in effect, is a ‘convergence of business interests and the aims of political hardliners who view migration as a threat to the EU’s homeland security’.21 15

Boca (2011), p 14. Boca (2005, 2007), in his extraordinary landmark work on the largely elided history of Italian colonialism, has marked the enormity of the violence unleashed during the course of this history, from necropolitical concentration camps to outright aerial bombing of Libyan towns with poison gas.

16

Palombo (2010), p 51.

17

See Perera (2007, 2009); Giannacopoulos (2007, 2011).

18

Palombo (2010), p 52.

19

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p 66.

20

See Deszpot (2012); Keller (2012); Fotiadis and Ciobanu (2013).

21

Hayes and Vermeulen (2012), p 5.


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The liberal democratic state’s system of governance pivots on the security/freedom/danger interplay: on the one hand, the state foments fear among its citizens of the prospective dangers that pose a risk to their existence; on the other, it offers the promise of security by deploying, via the ‘liberal art of government’, a range of ‘procedures of control, constraint and coercion’.22 The fomenting of anti-refugee and irregular migrant race-hate by a number of European political parties has had devastating and often fatal effects on targeted and vulnerable communities.23 The Australian equivalent of EUROSUR is the Surveillance Information Management System (SIM). SIM is ‘connected to the Australian Maritime Operations Centre. SIM allows a range of video, photography and electronic data and other aerial surveillance products to be provided to Border Protection Command in near real-time’.24 As with EUROSUR, Australia’s Border Protection Command’s priorities are ‘situational awareness, surveillance, intelligence collection and analysis, [and] deterrence’.25 On a number of levels, both EUROSUR and SIM are analogous in both their technological makeup and their respective missions. Due to space constraints, I will focus largely on EUROSUR here. ‘Situational awareness’, as defined by the EUROSUR proposal, refers to ‘the ability to monitor, detect, track and understand cross-border activities in order to find reasoned grounds for reaction … measures on the basis of combining new information with existing knowledge’.26 Situational awareness signals the state’s aspiration to visual and cognitive omniscience over the territory encompassed by its borders. Under the state’s gaze, technologies designed to monitor, detect and track will be deployed in order to bring into visibility the suspect subjects that traverse its terrain and cross its borders. The ‘reasoned grounds for reaction’ that these surveillance technologies will supply underscore the constitutive role that instrumentalist reason plays in statist operations. Operative here is an instrumentalist reason that is both literally instrumental in its dependence on technologies in order to supply the ‘reasoned grounds for reaction’ and symbolically instrumental, as I will elaborate below, in its transmutation and reduction of human targets into ‘new [bio]information’ that will be digitally encoded, distributed and exchanged through a series of interoperable networks and command chains. The proposed legislation places a strong emphasis on what it terms the ‘situational picture’ as crucial in determining the ‘grounds of reaction’. The ‘situational picture’ is defined as ‘a graphical interface to present near realtime and information … received from different authorities, sensors, platforms and other sources, which is shared across communication and 22

Foucault (2008), p 67.

23

See Carr (2012) for a detailed chronicling of this trans-EU political violence. Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (2012) [Annual Report], p 8. For a discussion of the production of ‘informated space’ through the deployment of surveillance technologies within an Australian border security context, see Wilson and Weber (2008).

24

25

Australian Border Protection Command (2009), p 15.

26

Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p 7.



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information channels with other authorities in order to achieve situational awareness and support the reaction capability along the external borders of the Member States and the pre-frontier area’.27 The articulation of the ‘situational picture’ in the state’s apparatus of instrumental visuality is loaded with profound Heideggerian resonances. ‘The fundamental event of the modern age,’ writes Heidegger, ‘is the conquest of the world as picture.’ 28 Underpinning this epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture has been the dominance of screen technologies in mediating virtually everything that can be seen in terms of ‘world’. In his theorisation of the epistemic shift to viewing the world as picture, Heidegger examines the manner in which contemporary systems of representation are predicated on objectifying what is seen precisely as ‘picture’, thus legitimating both symbolic and physical forms of violence.29 This process of objectification of the ‘real’ is undergirded by the play of science and technology: ‘Science sets upon the real. It orders it into place to the end that at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network.’ 30 The ‘real’, in the context of surveillance technologies, is precisely that which ‘exhibits’ itself through the tele-techno mediations of an ‘interacting network’ constituted by surveillance platforms, sensors, satellite links and screens. The enframing of the world as picture through ‘entrapping representation’ ensures the ‘real becomes secured in its objectness’.31 The world as picture, the world as situational picture, transmutes world into ‘a graphical interface’ that secures its targets as so many digitally trackable objects. The emphasis on ‘near’ in the description of the ‘situational picture’ as what effectively qualifies ‘real-time and information’ brings into critical focus the complex ensemble of spatio-temporal rifts that inscribe all electronic forms of surveillance and communication. The qualifier ‘near’ succinctly names the latency effect that haunts the micro-rift between ‘live’ and ‘real time’ because of the ineluctable logics of tele-techno mediation that effectively transmute ‘live’ images into retrospectively constructed spatiotemporal visual artefacts. I mark this process of tele-techno mediation here because it is crucial in establishing a series of distancing effects between the seer and the seen, between subject and object, between the state and its suspect targets. In this tele-techno-mediated surveillance context of statist visuality, refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants are seen as mere radar blimps, infrared blobs and anonymous numbers. A member of the Associazione Askavusa (Barefoot Association), a pro-irregular migrant activist association on the island of Lampedusa that cares for the displaced and homeless, succinctly sums up the contradistinction between the way in

27


28

Heidegger (1977), p 134.

29

Heidegger (1977), pp 149–50

30

Heidegger (1977), pp 167–8.

31

Heidegger (1977), p 168.


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which they view their charges and the state’s perspective: ‘They [the state] saw numbers and we saw people.’ 32 The ensemble of institutions that constitute the EU’s bordersurveillance matrix includes EUROSUR, national authorities of Member States and the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union, ‘established by Council Regulation (EC) No 2007/2004 … hereinafter referred to as “the Agency”’.33 The Agency is invested with the directive of operating 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The key term that structures its discursive operations is visuality. The mobilising of a complex array of visual technologies is driven by the desire for scopic disclosure, visibility and consequent control: ‘The Agency shall visualise … the impact levels attributed to the external borders in the European situational picture.’ 34 The gauging of ‘impact levels’ for border activity is critically determined by surveillance operations oriented by the processes of ‘tracking, identification and interception.’ 35 The governing metaphor of this proposed legislation is ‘picture’: everything in this text hinges on making the invisible visible; everything that remains beyond the reach of statist visuality is pre-positioned as threatening, suspect and criminal in advance of the fact. The description of the ‘situational picture’ in this proposed legislation is, in fact, scored by a militarised lexicon: ‘platforms’, ‘situational awareness’, ‘situational crisis’, ‘reaction capability’ and the ‘combating [of] illegal migration’ 36 – these terms all work to represent the border in terms of a theatre of war. The use of a series of threat indices and the militarised responses they provoke all function to produce a picture of a continent in a state of siege. EUROSUR, situated in this context, becomes one more apparatus in the consolidation of Fortress Europe. The threat to the inside (Europe) is not only located outside (the border); crucially now, it is located far beyond Europe’s borders in the amorphous domain of the pre-frontier. Through this process of extraterritorialisation, the EU can be seen to ‘push back its external borders or rather to police them at a distance in order to control unwanted migration flows’.37 The pre-frontier emerges as a sort of double externality: an externalised externality; this is a tautology of sorts, yet it signifies an imperially extended and amplified understanding of geopolitical space. Australia’s Border Protection Command articulates an almost identical geotechno-political agenda as EUROSUR, as it draws on the national Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO) to ‘obtain geospatial and imagery intelligence about the capabilities, intentions or activities of people 32

Quoted in Carr (2012), p 86.

33


34


35


36


37

Rijpma and Cremona (2007), p 12.



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or organisations outside Australia to meet the requirements of the government … in carrying out national security functions’.38 The critical preoccupation of the contemporary security state with the multi-layered aspect of the ‘pre’ – pre-frontier, pre-emptive risk, precautionary assessments and so on – works, in Ben Muller’s terms, to construct ‘the proliferation of borders’. Such a proliferation of borders, Muller argues, is predicated on ‘surveillance and identification technologies in contemporary border management’.39 In order to surveil, monitor and control this externalised externality that now encompasses both the liminal spaces of the border and everything that resides well beyond the border across a vast and spatially indeterminate outside, a panoptic system of statist visuality is articulated in the legislation’s triangulated ensemble of ‘pictures’: ‘The national situational picture, the European situational picture and the common pre-frontier intelligence picture shall be produced through the collection, evaluation, collation, analysis, interpretation, generation, visualisation and dissemination of information.’ 40 Here the categories of a double and layered internality (the nation and the EU) are folded into that exorbitant externality signified by the quasi-tautology of externalised externality. Through this topological move, singular European nation states and the larger supranational, quasi-state conglomerate – the EU – can be seen to secure a regime of biopolitical governmentality that encompasses, in an imperial fashion, both the same (the global North) and its absolute other (the global South) precisely in and through the logic of a neo-imperial globality. This globality is, as Denise Ferreira da Silva demonstrates, constituted by the ‘political-symbolic arsenal of race’.41 As such, this racialised globality works to determine who counts as a self-determining, human rights-bearing subject and who, conversely, ‘stands before the horizon of death’42 – and can thus be left to die with absolute impunity. The very other of Europe – everything that resides at the pre-frontier – becomes, through this move, at once what must remain outside even as it must be brought within the monitoring and governing gaze of Europe. As Sergio Carrera underscores in his analysis of Frontex, there is no equivocation in terms of the geopolitical circumscription of the EU’s understanding of its ‘global approach’ to border security: ‘the Global Approach primarily focuses on “priority actions focusing on Africa and the Mediterranean”’.43 The insertion of pre-frontier spaces within Europe’s surveillance sphere effectively establishes the EU’s borders as encompassing Africa and the Mediterranean, thereby enabling the systematic preclusion of refugees from the global South from making landfall on European soil in order to claim asylum. 38

Australian Border Protection Command (2009), p 95.

39

Muller (2010), p 14.

40


41

Da Silva (2007), p 129.

42

Da Silva (2009), 234.

43

Carrera (2007), p 7.


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In the Australian context, the practices of extraterritorialisation have seen the legislated excision of vast swathes of the Australia’s western and north-western coastline, including islands and reefs, thereby precluding asylum seekers from claiming asylum by landing on the now excised Australian territory and the simultaneous incorporation of Pacific islandnations into Australia’s carceral archipelago of immigration detention prisons. The governmentality of extraterritorialisation works in tandem with what Suvendrini Perera terms the ‘technology of excision’, forcing all informal boat arrivals of refugees and irregular migrants to be summarily dispatched to ‘host’ island nations such as a Nauru or Manus. ‘The technology of excision,’ writes Perera, ‘by which certain parts of the state’s territory are decreed by law not to be accountable by law, is one of the repertoire of technologies for producing hybrid spaces … [that] are designed to isolate, contain, and punish asylum seekers in onshore detention centres, deterritorialized zones, and the offshore arrangements known as the “Pacific Solution.”’ 44 These hybrid spaces, both in the Australian and European context, are where immigration prisons, transit camps, holding stations (often simply refurbished shipping containers) and zones d’attente are located. These hybrid spaces are locations that are often beyond the reach of law and accountable procedure. For the subjects of the global South caught within these hybrid spaces, they are also sites inscribed by suffering, trauma, self-harm and suicide.45 The attributes of statist visuality that emerge in the EUROSUR legislation are clearly named under Article 8’s rubric: ‘Situational pictures’: The pictures referred to in paragraph 1 shall consist of the following layers: (a) (b)

(c)

an events layer, containing information on incidents concerning … illegal migration, cross-border crime and crisis situations; an operational layer, containing information on the status and position of own assets and areas of operation, without prejudice to the legal limitations based on national law and environmental information; an analysis, containing strategic information, analytical products … and analysed information, as well as imagery and geo-data.46

The ‘events layer’ that constitutes the picture of statist visuality is determined by the ‘incident’: that which erupts within the staid continuum of the surveilling and monitoring gaze. The incident-as-event is the nonnormative figure that ruptures the banal unfolding of normative seriality on the screen; it is constituted by ‘illegal migration, cross-border crime and crisis situations.’ Here illegal immigration is at once situated as what is 44

Perera (2009), p 54.

45

See Pugliese (2009). Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p 12, emphasis and ellipses in original.

46



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precognitively identified and apprehended before the fact: that the figures seen to signal an ‘event’ might in fact be asylum seekers or refugees is something that cannot be acknowledged in this document; always already, before the fact, they are positioned as criminal subjects who have broken the law. The semantic burden of criminality that inscribes irregular immigrants before the fact of the determination of their actual status, and that forecloses the possibility that they might signify otherwise, is further consolidated by the semantic juxtaposition of irregular immigrants with cross-border crime. The operational layer conjoins the externalised events layer with the internal disposition of assets and areas of operation: it identifies and proceeds to operationalise the status of border security forces and surveillance apparatuses. Statist visuality is never univocal: its preoccupation with its absolute outside is fundamentally predicated on the knowledge of its own operational capabilities – the ‘status and position of its own internal assets’ precisely as what can be reactively deployed at and beyond the border of the state in the face of an ‘event.’ The final layer in this triadic structure of statist visuality is the ‘analysis layer, containing strategic information, analytical products … and analysed information, as well as imagery and geo-data’. In Michel de Certeau’s memorable differentiation between strategies and tactics, strategies are what are deployed by the state, and its various operatives, through the mobilisation of all the relevant authorities (the law, the police, the military) and their attendant technologies of repression. Tactics, in contradistinction, are the ‘art of the weak over the strong’; as such, they lack authority, the requisite power and force to secure anything but fleeting victories in their contestation of state power.47 The analysis layer of this EU regime of statist visuality is crucially underpinned by a series of strategies that are at once operational and analytical in their formation. The mobilisation of state assets in the face of a border incident is strategically enabled by the analytical data sourced, amongst other things, from ‘imagery and geo-data.’ One of the ‘sub-layers’ of the ‘national situational picture’ ‘contains information on unidentified and suspect … vehicles, vessels and other craft and persons present at … along or in the proximity of the external borders of the Member State concerned, as well as any other event which may have a significant impact on the control of the external borders’.48 Everything in this situational picture of statist visuality brings into focus the asymmetries of power that mark irregular migrants and their tactics of attempted incursion. Even as irregular migrants tactically mobilise rubber dinghies and rickety wooden boats in their attempts to reach and breach the borders of Fortress Europe, the full panoply of state power, encoded and enabled by a panoptic regime of statist visuality, is deployed against them. The array of visualising technologies that constitutes this panoptic regime ‘includes reference imagery, background maps, … validation of analysed information … and change analysis (earth observation imagery) as 47

De Certeau (1988), p ix.

48

Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p 14, emphasis in original.


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well as change detection, geo-referenced data and border permeability maps’.49 Augmenting this array of surveillance technologies is a range of ‘sensors mounted on any vehicles, vessels or other craft … including manned and unmanned aerial vehicles’.50 Envisioned here is a macro regime of statist visuality that is global and omniscient in its reach. In the context of these macro regimes of statist visuality, the European Organisation for Security (EOS) envisages the establishment of what it terms an ‘INTERNET of the SEA’ that will ‘create an exchange architecture and the infrastructure for feeding a secure exchange of information like in CISE (Common Information Sharing Environment) (levering also upon secure Cloud application)’ in order to secure ‘an aggregation of information and intelligence’.51 The various scopic technologies and their integrated databases collectively work to constitute networked systems of virtual border control. EUROSUR, working with Frontex, will effectively integrate satellite imagery ‘from GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security)’,52 geodata, border cartographies, ‘Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR)’ cameras, ‘Night Vision Goggles (NVG)’,53 ‘unmanned static and mobile sensors, fixed seismic sensors, and fixed and mobile cameras and radars’ 54 in order to identify and track event singularities that signal ‘change detection’ in the otherwise monotonous monitors of the state. Statist visuality, as a regime of untiring scopic vigilance, is marked by the unblinking stare of the surveillance screen that unfolds banal iterations of an always fragile status quo that is ever at risk of being disrupted by the (pre-) border incident. The use of seismic sensors underscores this interplay of banal stasis and disruptive event: the mere movement of a human figure in the vicinity of a surveilled border will alert the monitors to a ‘seismic’ rupture generated by a potential transgressor. The exhaustive array of visualising technologies that penetrate darkness, that detect body heat and movement, that track figures from the sky and so on all bring into sharp focus the configuration of a globally encompassing regime of statist visuality that dreams of leaving no corner of its territory and its extra-territorial spaces unobserved. The biopolitical dimensions of this regime of statist visuality must be underlined. This all-encompassing, exhaustive and globalising regime of visuality is strategically selective in what it deems as worthy of ‘reasoned grounds for reaction’. As a form of biopolitical governance, the surveilling agents of the state choose who will live and who will be, in Foucauldian terms, ‘let to die’. I refer here to the scandal of the ‘left-to-die boat’ detected 49 50

Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p 15. Emphasis in original. Presidency, Council of the European Union (2012), p 19. Underlining, emphasis and ellipsis in original.

51

EOS (2012), p 43.

52

EAMOCEBMSEU (2012), p 28.

53


54




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adrift in the Mediterranean with 72 refugees fleeing the upheaval in Libya.55 The boat was left to drift for two weeks across the Mediterranean – a sea assiduously surveilled and patrolled by an ensemble of EU/NATO forces and busily criss-crossed by scores of commercial boats and ships. Despite an alert from the Italian Coastguard, no rescue mission was ever mounted.56 This resulted in the death by starvation and dehydration of 63 of the people on the boat. The biopolitical lethality of these integrated systems of surveillance for the most vulnerable is further underscored by the death, in August 2002, of 16 Africans who ‘drowned after their boat capsized in a maneuver aimed at escaping the Integrative System of External Surveillance (Systèmme Intégré de Surveillance Extérieure, or SIVE)’.57 This external surveillance ‘sea monster’ is composed of an ensemble of ‘videotapes, satellite links, radar, infrared and thermal cameras, supported by boat and helicopter interventions’.58 In addition, a new surveillance system has been developed to ‘reinforce the SIVE project’: CLOSEYE. CLOSEYE is a surveillance system ‘which uses radar and surveillance cameras “scattered throughout the coastline to scan incoming vessels and intercept them if they are suspicious”’. The capabilities of CLOSEYE are further enhanced by the ‘addition of satellite imagery, aerostats, and drones such as the Camcopter S-100 [which] will significantly increase the powers of state authorities acting in the Mediterranean Sea’.59 The various necropolitical state interventions that I have been discussing must be situated within the larger context of irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from the global South embarking on their journeys for safe havens on the most fragile of craft or their stowing away in the civil equipment (shipping containers) and transport (underneath airplane wheel bays or truck axles) that is en route to the markets of the Global North with, again, often fatal results.60 Embodied Technologies of Extraterritorialisation So far, I have focused on delineating what can be termed the macro dimensions of statist visuality, encompassing a range of imaging technologies – radar, satellite imaging, geostat data and so on – in order to construct global pictures of the EU’s borders and its ‘events layers’. In what follows, I want to turn my attention to the micro dimensions of statist visuality, which are preoccupied with the deployment of technologies of 55

Human Rights Watch (2012a).

56

Hayes and Vermeulen (2012), p 16. OWNI.eu (2012). The acronym SIEV has chilling semantic resonances with the Australian government’s use of the term SIEV to describe Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels. On the anguished histories of SIEVs in Australian waters, and the loss of hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees in drowning deaths, see Perera (2009), pp 47, 72; Kevin (2004).

57

58

AAP (2011).

59

Statewatch (2013).

60

For a detailed analysis of these ‘civil modalities’ refugee deaths, see Pugliese (2009).


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visual capture at the small-scale level of the subject, their body and their identificatory attributes. This transition from macro to micro levels is facilitated by the articulation in the proposed EUROSUR legislation of yet another ‘sub-layer’ in the European situational picture that is concerned with ‘migrant profiles’.61 The term ‘profiles’ is inscribed with a long history of state authorities deploying various technologies and assessment practices – such as physiognomy, phrenology and so on – in order to ascertain the attributes of biocriminals who could be captured in advance of having committed any crime; ‘profiles’ also connotes, in this crime-prevention context, semantic associations with ‘criminal profiles’ and ‘racial profiling’. Both the EU and the Australian government have, over the last decade, deployed biometric technologies as border-management technologies in order to track, identify and prevent entry of irregular immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In the EU, Council Regulation No 2725/2000 of 11 December 2000 enabled the establishment of the Euordac biometric system: Fingerprints constitute an important element in establishing the exact identity of such persons [as asylum seekers]. It is necessary to set up a system for the comparison of their fingerprint data. To this end, it is necessary to set up a system known as ‘Eurodac,’ consisting of a Central Unit, to be established within the Commission and which will operate as a computerised central database of fingerprint data, as well as of the electronic means of transmission between the Member States and the central database. It is also necessary to require the Member States promptly to take fingerprints of every applicant for asylum and of every alien who is apprehended in connection with the irregular crossing of an external border of a Member State, if they are at least 14 years of age.62

The Eurodac biometric system is premised on a series of networked databases that constructs an interoperable surveillance grid for the identification and processing of all enrolled subjects. A central platform within this network is the European Image-Archiving System (FADO) that is designed as a vast repository of computerised information on genuine and false identity documents. The EU, furthermore, is looking to amplify this system of biometric surveillance and monitoring by introducing ‘so-called “smart borders” to achieve total control over all cross-border movements. Following the US model, the plan is to introduce a massive database that will store information, including fingerprints, of all non-EU citizens leaving or entering the Union.’ 63 This smart-borders biometric system will have, according to the literature, the inbuilt capability for ‘overstayers’ alert. As Hayes and Vermeulen note, ‘An “overstayers” alert can … only ever constitute a presumption of illegal residence’, precisely because it assumes that the reason why a subject may overstay their residency is illegal before 61


62

EU Council Regulation (EC) No 2725/2000, L 316/1.

63




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the fact, when they might be overstaying due to wholly legal reasons such as claiming asylum, escaping persecution in their country of origin and so on.64 The issue of the border is one of the defining concerns of biometric technologies.65 These are technologies preoccupied with marking, surveilling and controlling the complex topology of the border. Biometric systems are technologies that govern points of entry into nations, institutions, organisations, databases and so on; as such, biometric technologies must be seen as co-constitutive of the border: they are literally technologies of the border. Simultaneously, biometric systems are also constitutive of the individuating singularity of bodies: their disciplinary taxonomies, tacit knowledges and normative epistemologies work to produce bodies that are either biometrically legible or not, bodies that are either precluded or enabled to cross the border.66 Furthermore, the topology of the border is rendered, through the application of biometric technologies, as something that is at once fixed and mobile, operating well beyond the concrete reality of the border checkpoint. Louise Amoore notes that the ‘biometric border is the portable border par excellence’.67 Irma van der Ploeg delineates the embodied dimensions of this portable biometric border: By virtue of the closer link established by IT-systems and biometrics between persons and their registered identities, the border becomes more than ever before part of the embodied identity of certain groups of people, verifiable at any of the many points of access to increasingly interconnected databases, and so increasingly difficult to get rid of wherever they find themselves. It thus enables the extension of the function of the border as selective and discriminating barrier beyond the actual geographical line of the inside of the country, effectively inscribed on people’s bodies.68

Buried in a report that documents the ‘first coordinated inspection’ of the Eurodac system is a concern regarding ‘cases of “impossibility to enrol”, [that is] where the individual has no usable fingerprints’.69 The report identifies ‘mutilation’ which is ‘apparently self-inflicted in more and more cases’ by refugees and asylum seekers seeking to make their bodies illegible to the Eurodac biometric system.70 As a harrowing exercise of agency in order to escape identification and capture by the state’s biopolitical technologies and apparatuses, self-harm evidences the despair and urgency of refugees seeking to cross a border in order to gain asylum. The disciplinary violence of these biopolitical technologies can only be evaded

64

Hayes and Vermeulen (2012), p. 41.

65

Van der Ploeg (2005), pp 115–34.

66

See Pugliese (2010), pp 158–63.

67

Amoore (2006), p 338.

68

Van der Ploeg (2005), p 133.

69

EURODAC Supervision Coordination Group (2007), p 15.

70

EURODAC Supervision Coordination Group (2007), p 15.


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by the exercise of a self-inflicted violence that attempts to render the signifying attributes of the flesh biometrically unintelligible. Situated in these fraught contexts, biometric technologies function as disciplinary apparatuses fundamental to the biopolitical operations of the nation-state. ‘Disciplinary power,’ Foucault argues, ‘is individualizing because it fastens the subject-function to the somatic singularity by means of … a system of pangraphic panopticism.’ 71 Pangraphic panopticism articulates the digital corpo-graphing of biometric signatures into interoperable biometric databases networked across nation-states and multiple institutions. As biopolitical instantiations of disciplinary power, biometric systems are instrumental in fastening subject-functions to the somatic singularity of the persons in question – for example, undocumented refugee. ‘[I]t is insofar,’ Foucault writes, ‘as the somatic singularity became the bearer of the subject-function through disciplinary mechanisms that the individual appeared within a political system.’72 In the context of the Eurodac system, the disciplinary mechanisms of biometrics proceed to fasten to the somatic singularity of the undocumented refugee or irregular migrant the following biopolitically determined subject-function: illegal person (transgressing the borders of the nation-state) who has been criminalised in advance of the fact of having actually committed any crime. In the Australian context, the Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004, which came into effect on 27 August 2004, provides ‘a wider legislative basis for collecting personal identifiers such as photographs, signatures and fingerprints, to enhance the state’s ability to establish and authenticate the identity of non-citizens at various stages of immigration processing, and on entry to and departure from Australia’.73 The Australian government now demands the biometric data of immigration detainees and applicants applying for protection (class XA) visa onshore; as of October 2010, biometrics was also incorporated ‘into the processing and lodging of offshore visa applications in certain countries’.74 Significantly, the Act legitimates the use of force in the extraction of biodata from reluctant subjects. Under the rubric of ‘When use of force is permitted’, the Act states that: ‘Subject to subsection (2) and section 261AF, an authorised officer, or a person under section 261AG to the authorised officer, may use reasonable force.’ 75 What exactly constitutes ‘reasonable’ force remains undefined. What is clear, however, is that this process of the extraction of bio-identificatory data exemplifies the instrumentalist rationality of state power, with its ‘reasonable’ – because ‘legitimate’ – exercise of violence along a biopolitical continuum that commences with the exercise of symbolic violence (biometric scanning) and culminates in 71


72


73

DIMIA (2005).

74

DIAC (2010), p 3.

75

Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004, s 261AE.



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physical violence that entails the use of force for the extraction of biodata from the most vulnerable and often traumatised of subjects: refugees and asylum seekers. In the Australian context, networked systems of biopolitical control and border surveillance are being developed and implemented under the rubric of an ‘integrated approach to the use of biometric technology for border control’ that includes the establishment of an ‘Identity Services Repository for the matching of face and fingerprint images for visa applicants’.76 The biometric biodata of asylum seekers seeking refuge in Australia ‘will be checked against records in the United States, Britain, Canada and New Zealand in search for multiple identities and criminal backgrounds’.77 As with the Eurodac system, what is operative here is a networked exchange of the biodata of subjects of the global South within a transnational alliance of nations from the global North driven by risk-management and pre-frontier border practices. The ‘Identity Services Repository’ and the Eurodac system extend the networked reach of governmental anatomies of power even as they operate as anatomising archives of biometric-templates-as-‘body-bits’ – and I deploy the term ‘bits’ in both its in-silico, digitised sense and in its metaphorical meaning of segmenting and anatomising the body of the biometrically scanned subject. This statist archiving of biometric ‘body bits’ fundamentally functions to dislocate the subject from their body and, through processes of networked classification and dissemination, precludes them from the possibility of agentic governance over their own biodata. As with the global North’s deployment of macro systems and technologies of extraterritorialisation, the use of biometric systems is predicated on the extraterritorialisation of borders at the micro level of embodiment. In biopolitical terms, biometric technologies inscribe borders on bodies that are effectively located well beyond the physical borders of the nations of the global North in order to pre-emptively foreclose the movement of irregular migrants and asylum seekers by attempting to ‘fix’ them at the very locus of the pre-frontier. As Hayes and Vermeulen remark: the demand for EUROSUR and smart borders builds on a longer-term trend in EU policy that makes it increasingly more difficult for refugees and others in need of protection to reach EU territory. It is clear that the purpose of both systems is to extend EU borders surveillance further away from the EU’s actual territorial borders into the high seas and territories of third countries (“the pre-frontier area”). This trend can only be interpreted as a concerted attempt by member states to avoid responsibility for asylum claims.78

To a degree, technologies of extraterritorialisation can be said to instantiate, in keeping with their expropriative logics, geographies of dispossession and statist practices of immobilisation and fixity. Located (via 76

Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004, s 261AE.

77

Sharp (2009).

78


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technologies of statist visuality) at the pre-frontier, the irregular migrant becomes a target of ‘preventative’ intervention, and is thereby precluded from travelling across the very same spaces that the traveller of the global North is privileged to traverse. Sergio Carrera brings into focus the detrimental effects of preventative intervention for refugees and irregular migrants. Noting how it may violate the principle of non-refoulement and the ‘regime of protection provided by the border of the European Community’, Carrera writes that: The process of prevention which underlines this kind of border presupposes a practice of labelling an individual as an ‘irregular immigrant’ even before s/he leaves the country and enters EU territory. This preventative action ignores the fact that the targeted individual may not be in fact an ‘illegal’ but a potential asylum seeker or refugee. The process of externalisation implies the prevention of the ‘would-be-irregular immigrant’ or ‘would-be asylum seeker’ from reaching the EU border and thereby from moving into any of these juridical categories. As a general rule, nobody should fall within the category of irregularity before entering EU territory.79

Statist regimes of visuality work to de-subjectify the subject and to render them into mere suspect object that must be surveilled, monitored and immobilised – in detention centres, transit camps and other carceral loci. Robert Castel outlines the Foucauldian dimensions of the state’s increasing use of practices of ‘preventative’ intervention: ‘There is, in fact, no longer a relation of immediacy with a subject because there is no longer a subject. What the new preventative policies primarily address is no longer individuals but factors liable to produce risk.’ 80 Both the EU and Australia’s border policies are foundationally oriented by the discourse of ‘risk management’. Frontex has its own Risk Analysis Unit. This unit is described in the literature as ‘the “brain” of Frontex’.81 Frontex’s ‘brain’ is committed to producing ‘Tailored Risk Analyses and Threat Assessments on topics or geographical regions of concern’, including ‘Risk Profiles and their update’ that draw upon ‘the processing of personal data for risk analysis’.82 The Australian government’s Customs and Border Protection policy headlines risk management in its diagrammatic mapping of what it terms the ‘border continuum’: ‘We work ahead of the physical border to identify and manage risks.’ 83 Ahead of the physical border lie the indeterminate territories of the global South: externalised externalities that at once constitute the prefrontier (whatever lies exterior to the exteriority of the frontier) and the de79

Carrera (2007), p 25.

80

Castel (1991), p 288.

81

Frontex Information and Transparency Team (2010), p 65. European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (2012), pp 38–9, 12.

82

83

Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (2009), p 2.



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subjectified and technologically instrumentalised ‘factors liable to produce risk’ – irregular migrants, refugees, asylum seekers – whose risk status is determined by a statist calculus of probabilities manufactured, for example, by Frontex’s Risk Analysis Unit. The calculus of probabilities that enables the effective liquidation of the subject must be seen as a structural effect of a statist regime of visuality that instrumentalises life in terms of a digitised algebraic formula. Working together with the objectifying effects of screen technologies, this statist regime of visuality and risk probabilities works to render the material abstract (the human subject rendered into a digital node within interoperational networks), the individual generic (the figure in the landscape as mere stereotyped index of risk factors) and the subject object (the individual subject desubjectified as target object). The technological amplification of this statist regime of visuality can be seen in the EU’s and Australia’s use of surveillance drones for border security and the convergence of surveillance drones and biometric technologies. Progeny is a surveillance drone equipped with biometric scanning at-a-distance technology that is now being trialled. Aside from the use of facial-scan biometrics, a Progeny drone can identify its prey through a type of ‘digital stereotyping’: ‘Using a series of so-called “soft biometrics” – everything from age to gender to “ethnicity” to “skin color” to height and weight – the system can keep track of targets “at ranges that are impossible to do with facial recognition”.’ 84 ‘Digital stereotyping’ succinctly encapsulates the transmutation of the individual subject into desubjectified generic target and criminalised ‘type’, and its reliance on the dubious descriptors of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘skin colour’ evidences its enmeshment within regimes of raciality. This statist regime of visuality that I have been elaborating, by abstracting its human targets and reducing them to a calculable formula of ‘risk factors’, is instrumental in enabling the biopolitics of who shall live and who can be left to die. Nowhere is the biopolitical violence of this regime of statist visuality that I have been working to materialise in all of its constitutive parts more evident than in the previously mentioned ‘left-to-die boat’ case. The testimonies of the survivors graphically articulate the manner in which they were desubjectified, rendered generic, and effectively dismissed as so much non-human detritus from the global South that could be left to die – even as they were surveilled and scrutinised by a regime of statist visuality: The survivors all concur that on what could have been day 10 of their trip they drifted close to a very large military vessel. It was possibly an aircraft carrier … and the boat was close enough for them to see people on board wearing different coloured military uniforms. ‘Some were looking through binoculars and others were taking pictures of us,’ Ghirma told me. The ship remained at a distance, so the people started shouting and waving their arms. ‘They’re just watching that 84

Shachtman (2011). For a critique of the concept of ‘soft biometrics’, see Pugliese (2010), pp 125–8.

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there are dead children and other bodies’ … They held up the dead babies and the sick women, and also the empty fuel tanks … ‘and in spite of our many gestures, they were not responding at all. And gradually, they just disappeared, and we realised that they were not responding, replying to our distress calls at all,’ Ghirma recalled.85

Caught under the statist gaze of binoculars and cameras, the African refugees fail to qualify or signify as human subjects in need of rescue; rather, they are scopically desubjectified and transmuted into an undifferentiated array of floating objects: dead babies, sick women, empty fuel cans – all are interchangeable within this necropolitical economy of statist visuality. In the Australian context, the recent sinking of SIEV 358 chillingly parallels this Mediterranean disaster. On 21 June 2012, an overloaded asylum-seeker boat capsized and sank about 110 nautical miles from Christmas Island: ‘102 bodies were retrieved and a further eighty-five people presumed drowned’.86 In his account of the coronial inquest into this sinking, Tony Kevin exposes disturbing evidence that suggests that Australian search and rescue personnel could have averted this maritime disaster. Despite ‘two harrowing survivor testimonies and tapes of sixteen telephone distress calls to RCC [Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s Rescue Coordination Centre]’ made over fifteen hours, and the ‘monitoring at all times by Australian agencies’, RCC rescue coordinator Alan Lloyd judged the distress calls ‘to be “the normal refugee patter”’.87 In other words, the exhaustive monitoring and surveillance of these refugees in distress by the relevant Australian border and rescue authorities did little more than reduce the boatload of asylum seekers to non-human cargo articulating little more that ‘patter’ – ‘patter’, I underscore, signifies the making of mere mechanical noise or meaningless talk. The violent objectifying effects of the statist regimes of visuality that I have been tracking are underpinned by the militarisation of border security. In the words of Australia’s Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison, ‘We’re not running a taxi service or a reception centre. We are running a military-led border security operation.’ 88 The militarisation of the borders of the nations of the global North is predicated on the argument that it will stop the flow of people from the global South. Yet, as Ana Raquel Minian has found in her study, border militarisation ‘did not reduce migration but instead made it more dangerous’.89 It makes it more dangerous and, I would add, more lethal – and the mounting deaths of asylum seekers and irregular migrants testify to this necropolitical fact: 19,142 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean in the last 24 years.90 Giusi 85

Parliamentary Assembly/Assemblé parlementaire (2012), p 10.

86

Kevin (2013).

87

Kevin (2013).

88

Operation Sovereign Borders (2013).

89

Winterbottom (2013).

90

Perkowski (2013).


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Nicolini, mayor of Lampedusa, draws attention to the consequences of the militarisation of border security: ‘we are witnessing war-like levels of death at Europe’s frontiers’.91 As I have noted elsewhere, in the context of the drowned victims of the Global South that wash up on the shores of the coasts of southern Europe, disposable subaltern subjects (the refugee, the undocumented, the clandestino) live and die the ontotautology of their clandestine status, literally remaining invisible to global North subjects despite being directly in their line of sight.92 Even as I write, this disturbing fact has been brought into glaring light with the death of 363 people who, fleeing war-torn Eritrea – another former Italian colony – and Somalia, drowned just off the coast of Lampedusa: It was around 3.30am on Thursday [3 October 2013] morning when a boat with 518 people, most of them from Somalia and Eritrea, got into distress about 550 metres off the Lampedusa coastline. The motor had broken down, and water started flowing into the ship. Survivors tell that their mobile phones had been taken away from them for the journey to avoid detection, so they used their ship’s horn and signalled SOS also optically. Three fishing boats passed their vicinity and did not help, nor did they notify the coast guards … Two boats of the Guardia di Finanza nearby did not join the rescue effort. In addition, some fishermen report having been hindered in rescuing more people.93

Paralleling numerous other such cases, ‘Lampedusa fishermen admitted that they were often hesitant to save migrants, with one of them asserting that “this immigration law is killing people”.’ 94 In the context of this latest disaster, the recent eulogistic remark by Italy’s prime minister, Enrico Letta – that ‘those who died off Lampedusa, men, women and children, are from today onwards Italian citizens’ 95 – emerges as utterly grotesque in its posthumous conferring of EU citizenship precisely on those subjects from the global South who were the very victims of the EU’s immigration laws and its violent regime of statist visuality. In the necropolitical worlds generated by the EU’s immigration laws, effective citizenship for the irregular migrants and refugees of the global South is what can only be conferred after a fatal disaster and only on those subjects who are now dead. What remains unsaid in Prime Minister Letta’s public show of sympathy is the brutal fact that ‘the 155 survivors of October 3rd will be charged with “illegal immigration”, it was already announced. According to Italian law, this is an offence punishable with a €5,000 fine.’ 96 The life-risking dangers 91

Cited in Perkowski (2013).

92

Pugliese (2009a).

93

Perkowski (2013).

94

Cited in Perkowski (2013). Cited in ‘Quei morti da oggi sono cittadini italiani,’ Nuovo Paese, November 2013, p 23. Translation from the Italian is mine.

95

96

Perkowski (2013).

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that irregular migrants and refugees endure in their journeys to the lands of the global North preclude them from claiming the right to citizenship; however, dying in the process of these same journeys enables the irregular migrant to be transmuted, posthumously and thus uselessly, into a ‘legal’ citizen-subject. What is evidenced here is the violent double logic of the necropolitical state that deploys preclusionary laws and technologies against the very subjects who, once dead, can then ceremoniously be inducted into the category of citizens. As dead citizens, they are interred in the very ground they were effectively barred from reaching or inhabiting while still alive. Clandestine Constellations The statist technologies of externalisation that I have been discussing need also to be viewed as technologies of interiorisation. Precisely what the state digitally renders – the irregular migrant or asylum seeker – as an absolute exteriority located outside the extraterritorialised space of the nation-state (or supranation-state assemblage: the EU) must be seen as simultaneously internalised – as biodata or digital node – within the very information centres and databases of the nation-state. As decorporealised digital spectres, irregular migrants and asylum seekers circulate within the information and surveillance networks of the EU countries from which they have officially been excluded: in effect, they digitally traverse the very spaces, sites and geographies they are precluded from physically entering. Operative here are two levels of materiality that are at once contradictory yet topologically conjoined: one level in which the corporeal target subject is immobilised as immanent to the extraterritorialised space outside the nation-state; and another level that sees the target subject digitally decorporealised into mere identificatory biodata that, ironically, is spectrally enabled to have the very freedom of movement of the Schengen-empowered supranational citizen. In the context of an article that has been concerned with mapping statist visuality, its constitutive attributes and its instrumentalising modalities, I want to conclude on a note of counter-visuality. Specifically, I want to counterpose statist visuality – with its transmutation of target subjects’ bodies, identities, actions and itineraries into mere tele-techno mediated informational events of surveillance, control and exclusion – with the visually interrogative work of Bouchra Khalili. Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Between 2008 and 2011, Khalili embarked on a series of journeys from North Africa to Europe and the Middle East. Encountering clandestini along the way, she moved across key cities on the map of irregular migration routes: Annaba, Bari, Barcelona, Istanbul, Rome, Milan, Marseilles and so on. She recorded the stories of the clandestini she met in a work titled The Mapping Journey Project. The Mapping Journey Project articulates a significantly different cartography to that of the state. Physically inscribing the official maps of the state with a thick marker pen and a voiceover narrative, Khalili’s multimedia project at once corporealises and narrativises the everyday concerns, emotions and events that constitute the singular lives of irregular migrants and other clandestine subjects (Figure 1).



593

Figure 1. Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #7, Video Still. Bouchra Khalili©Galerie Polaris Paris. The state’s desubjectifying accounts of irregular migrants as mere ‘risk factors’ within biopolitical information networks are powerfully interrogated by Khalili through the oral articulation of the individuating stories and journeys of actual embodied subjects. Khalili at once narratives and illustrates her journeys. She exhaustively names and materialises all the minute and affecting details of those fraught journeys that would otherwise be excluded from the official texts of the state. Through this process, she belies the instrumentalist apparatuses of state that reduce individual subjects to serialised and interchangeable aggregations of generic ‘risk indices’ or ‘digital stereotypes’. Through her documented, openly clandestine narratives, she speaks back to the state while simultaneously mocking and interrogating the state’s totalising aspiration to control and preclude the movement of its designated undesirables. Khalili, wielding red marker in her black hand, effectively stages a form of physical graffiti across the official maps of the state. As physical graffiti of embodied and lived journeys, she defies and overturns, with the stroke of a pen, the very borders of the state. Through this process, Khalili stages a double act of intervention: at the same time that she physically intextuates (both orally, through her narratives, and graphically, with her red marker pen) the maps of state with her lived journeys, she sets in train cross-border movements and transnational flows that refuse and defy the massive panoply of border surveillance technologies mobilised by the state to preclude the very journeys Khalili’s subjects have in effect staged. As such, Khalili’s Mapping Project brings into critical focus the arbitrary and porous status of the very entities the state obsessively attempts to secure: the nation, its sovereignty and its borders.


594


The geographies of the dispossessed, the excluded and of those criminalisedbefore-the-fact are, in Khalili’s Mapping Project, inscribed across the very heart of Europe. Khalili stages the return of everything the global North works assiduously to preclude. Her red-marked itineraries of clandestini articulate another politico-anatomy altogether to that presented by the likes of EUROSUR, Frontex and Eurodac. As the inverse of the border-security hegemon, Khalili’s border transgressions and itineraries articulate a politico-anatomy of fragile yet self-determined subjects living lives of precarity and fraught mobility. In The Mapping Journey Project installation, Khalili stages her most audacious move by juxtaposing the official maps of state (that she personalises with the marked trajectories and lived histories of clandestini) with what appear to be celestial maps of stellar constellations: The Constellations series of silkscreen prints (Figure 2). On a deep blue ground that one assumes is outer space, stellar constellations are configured. On closer inspection, the stellar constellations reveal themselves to be the very grounded itineraries that Khalili undertook during her journeys across North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. The stellar constellations’ key points of configuration are not stars, but the very terrestrial cities through which Khalili moved: Beni-Mellal, Alicante, Barcelona, Torino, Utrecht. Wrenched from the violently instrumentalist modalities of statist visuality, the journeys, lives and stories of irregular migrants here signify entirely otherwise.

Figure 2: Bouchra Khalili, Constellations, Figure 7, 60 x 40cm. Bouchra Khalili©Galerie Polaris Paris


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Acknowledgements I am grateful to Bouchra Khalili and Galerie Polaris, Paris, for their generosity in giving me permission to reproduce Khalili’s images. A huge thanks to Constance Owen for her brilliant and invaluable research assistance.


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