The Figure of the Migrant

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben borrows from Primo Levi the figure of the Müsselmann—the starving, exhausted, inert captive of the Nazi concentration camps—and expands it to the whole of humanity: “The Müsselmann… is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins when dignity ends.” Similarly, Thomas Nail uses the figure of the migrant to delineate a new form of politics that starts where citizenship and sovereignty end. According to the young American philosopher, “the twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant.” Today, there are over 1 billion migrants—and each decade the global percentage of migrants and refugees grows. Moving from one place to another has become a experience familiar to tourists as well as contract laborers, to expats as well as refugees. What these very different categories share together is a temporary deprivation of the rights that territory entails: the need to declare and document their identity, the inability to exert their rights as citizen in their place of relocation, the limited access to work and social benefits. We are all, in a way, migrants.Political theory is ill-equipped to account for the figure of the migrant. It treats individuals and societies from the perspective of fixed points: the household, the settlement, the city, the state. Its key concepts—territory, sovereignty, citizenship, democracy—always presupposes a static situation, when people can be pinned down to one place. Seen from this perspective, the migrant is always perceived as a secondary or derivative figure with respect to place-bound social membership. The migrant is the person who moves from one place to another, from point A to point B, but who is still defined by his or her state of origin and country of destination. Hence the dichotomy between emigrants—seen from their point of departure—and immigrants—defined by their point of destination. The problem with this definition is that it doesn’t apply to modern migrants. Their point of origin is confused by failed states, shifting borders, and contested identities. And the end of their journey is forever deferred. Migrants dwell in the in-between, and generate liminal spaces that are forever in flux: refugee camps, retention centers, shanty towns and temporary shelters.In a way, the problem is philosophical. Western philosophy starts from the premisses of the stability of concepts, the fixity of meaning, and the unmovable nature of truth. In Greek antiquity, Zeno of Elea believed reality was an uncreated and indestructible immobile whole. He formulated his famous paradox to present mobility as an impossibility. A spatial trajectory can always be divided at infinitum, making it impossible for an arrow to reach its target. But what Zeno’s paradox shows is that movement cannot be segmented without destroying it. Movement always predates immobility. According to Bergson “movement is reality itself.” Bergson is one of the few philosophers that help Thomas Nail conceptualize society as something forever in flux. His other references include Lucretius, who described life as movement; Karl Marx, whose materialist dialectics puts history forever on the move; and Deleuze, with his theory of the movement-image. But these are only distant sources of inspiration: the Figure of the Migrant is a work of political theory, not of abstract philosophy.The major thesis of the book is that the migrant has become the political figure of our time. The migrant is not defined by place, but by movement. Thus, if we want to understand the figure of the migrant without pinning it down to a nation-state or a location, we must also understand society itself according to movement. Societies are not static places with fixed characteristics and persons: societies are always in motion. To describe societies on the move and people without mooring or attachment, old categories of political philosophy are not adequate: we need a whole new theory of social motion. To use an analogy with physics, we need to move social analysis from the description of solid states and concrete particles, as in solid mechanics, to the formalization of continuous flows and liquid states, as with the physics of fluids. We need a new language that starts with movement and that explains fixed points and static categories as the result of flows and motions. This is a complete departure from earlier theories, a scientific revolution akin to the invention of differential calculus—the mathematics of flows.This is what the author attempts to provide, by introducing a flurry of new concepts and ideas. Nail starts his theory from a clean slate, and builds his science of society in motion from the ground up. He shows how social motion is constitutive of the various social categories that arbitrarily relativize motion into territorial, political, juridical, and economic orders or regimes. We need to consider these categories as processes—of territorial accumulation, political control, juridical ordering, and economic profit. These processes are themselves the result of four social forces: centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic. Territory, for example, is not a fixed thing: it is a continual process shaped by a number of different material flows that move inward, centripetally, toward a center and disperse at the periphery, creating the conditions of a territorial hierarchy. In the last instance, everything that looks static and solid can be reduced to flows, junctions, circuits and circulation.One is here reminded of Marx’s famous quote: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Or to take a less quoted sentence, “Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, so also does social production.” Thomas Nail takes from Marx not just metaphors, but a whole way to conceptualize history. The notion of “expansion by expulsion” that stands at the core of his reasoning is a radicalization of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation and social periodicity. The development of a given social regime (expansion) has always been predicated on the deprivation of the social status of certain categories of people (expulsion). Expulsion does not simply means forcing people off their land (although in many cases it may include this). It also means depriving people of their political rights through slavery, criminalizing types of persons through vagabondage, or restricting their access to work through unemployment.Expansion and expulsion are two faces of the same coin: without the expulsion of the people, there is no expansion of private property, no primitive accumulation of capital and thus no capitalism. But expansion by expulsion is not limited to capitalism: we see it at work throughout history, from the Neolithic to the present. To paraphrase Marx, Nail shows that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the expulsion of migrants. The expulsion from territory that starts with the invention of agriculture generates the figure of the nomad, the pastoralist or the hunter-gatherer: people are pushed away from arable land into surrounding mountains and deserts. Expulsion from the city, by depriving people of their political rights, generates the barbarian, the slave, the outcast. Expulsion from the juridical order creates the vagabond, the brigand, the outlaw. Expulsion from economic profit, the proletarian. These four figures of the migrant—the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, the working class—each embody a particular stage of history, characterized by a certain regime of circulation. They combine today in the figure of the modern migrant—as in the “migrant crisis” that is now creating a moral panic throughout Europe.The migrant is not only an empirical figure but also heralds a new model of political membership still in its early stages. People on the move invite us to rethink the fundamentals of social theory and political philosophy. They shed a new light on the human nature under conditions of neoliberalism and precariousness. Migrants are not deprived of a certain form of agency—described as “pedetic”, linked with their ability to move with their feet—. Migrants make history: individually or collectively, they give rise to new forms of mobilizations and protests that poses an alternative to social expulsion. This pedetic force is itself linked with specific forms of movement—continuous oscillation, waves, pressure—that drive a wedge in the mechanics of social circulation. These forms of kinopolitics—the politics of social motion—are not always progressive: Genghis Khan, the nomad-barbarian, went on record to expose his program as “Kill them all and destroy their homes.” But on the whole, social movements generated by migrant figures throughout history stand on the side of social progress.This is why the current “migrant crisis” is particularly disturbing. “Illegal” immigrants—note that in liberal law, only an act can be qualified as illegal, and not a person—are seen as a menace to the social order. They are considered as racially inferior, culturally unassimilable, and politically dangerous. The metaphors used to describe them—the flood, the invasion, the assault—deny their condition as individuals and directly refer to the history of the fall of the Roman empire, as in the expression “barbarians at the gates”. In the United States and in Europe, as in the ancient empires, large military-style walls are built and guarded to control the movement of undesirable foreigners into the community. Another characteristic of the ancient barbarian still active today is political disenfranchisement. Today’s migrants are expelled from political life, they do not have the right to vote and they are not represented politically.Thomas Nail reminds us that Rome didn’t fall because of the assault of the barbarians: it fell because it refused to give shelter to the Germanic tribes that were pushed away by the Huns’ invasion of Europe. When these Mongolian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme cruelty. According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. Their treatment stands in sharp contrast with earlier periods, when Rome had provided asylum and security to peoples at its borders. May we learn from the grandeur that was Rome, and meditate the reasons why Rome fell.

A great book and excellent new theorization of the migrant in relation to the state. However, in articulating this theory Nail reiterates some of the primary ideas about how migrations systems work that scholars have worked diligently to (correctly, in my opinion) debunk as faulty. The reliance on push-pull structural theories of migration was particularly disappointing to see here, especially because neither Nail's discussion of kinopolitics nor its link to global requires the inclusion of push/pull ideas. Worth a read just the same.

Libro nuovissimo in perfette condizioni. Ricevuto nel tempo stabilito. Servizio totalmente soddisfacente. Riutilizzero' il servizio molto presto.Non ho bisogno di aggiungere altro.

Figure of a Migrant is in the central tool when discussing 'how,' 'why' and gives description to the function of movement in our common understanding of what a migrant is.